Washington, DC
January 16, 2002
Thomas Scully, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services:
“… with all the best intentions, we all want to do overnight fixes and fix everything tomorrow. And the system’s too big and the finances are too big, and it just can’t happen.
“So, to some degree, we gotta figure out-we got 42 million uninsured today. How do we get to knocking that down in 10 years? It’s not gonna happen in one year. We don’t have a Medicare drug benefit today. It’s not gonna happen next year. How do we get one in 8 or 9 years that works, that doesn’t blow up the system?
“Medicaid is a wonderful program, but it’s unbelievably, as many of you know, disproportionate in the way it subsidizes people among the states. It needs to be fixed. That’s a morass that’s gonna take 25 years to fix. But I hope, as healthcare policy people, we can start thinking about longer-term goals, instead of the short-term fixes.”
Comment: With this kind of dynamic leadership, we should have health care reform within… well… uh… maybe not after all… at least during this administration.