Final Report of National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform
C-SPAN
December 1, 2010
From a discussion of the final recommendations, to be voted on by December 3:
Sen Dick Durbin (D-IL): We are hastening the day when the only option left will be a public option.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI): I think Sen. Durbin probably said it right. We are hastening the day when the only option is the public option. I think you’re right (directed to Sen. Durbin), and I think that this advances that possibility and likelihood.
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX): I would agree with Sen. Durbin… you are hastening more people into the public option.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL): To say that we’re going to reduce our deficit and our debt by asking Medicare beneficiaries to pay more for their health care, I think is absolutely unconscionable. …already 30 percent of their income going to health care costs, I think is absolutely the wrong way to go when we do have other options. I put on the table, not as an if-all-else fails, a public option to reduce health care costs.
PNHP has issued a response to the commission recommendations:
“Deficit panel’s Rx is wrong medicine: doctors’ group”
https://www.pnhp.org/news/2010/december/deficit-panels-rx-is-wrong-medicine-doctors-group
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
The commission members understand that health care is the greatest contributor to our federal budget deficit. Most of them recognize that the health spending recommendations in their final report are inadequate to control continuing cost escalation.
Some would reduce government spending by shifting more costs to Medicare beneficiaries, even though they understand that current out-of-pocket costs are already excessively burdensome. To others, that would be unconscionable.
There seemed to be an understanding by both Democratic and Republican commission members that the failure to control Medicare spending will hasten the day when the public option will be the only option.
Why a public option? Apparently there is bipartisan agreement that a government insurance program would be more effective in slowing future health care spending. They understand that government systems have worked well in other nations.
Where they are confused is that they seem to think that all you need is the option of choosing a government plan, and that is enough to enable all of the single payer efficiencies. Of course, this is where they’re wrong. A government plan offered within our market of private plans is incapable of instituting most of the changes that make single payer systems work. As simply another player in our fragmented, dysfunctional system, it would be a very feeble force for efficiency.
So what does this really mean? It says that both Republicans and Democrats know that we are going to have to have direct government involvement if we ever hope to control health care spending, but they still need to learn that there is a tremendous difference between a powerful single payer monopsony and a wimpy public option.