Big Health Care Promises To Cut $2 Trillion Over 10 Years
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Health Care, Money
This is pretty significant because the one thing that has always gotten in the way of universal health care is the massive cost. But if the health insurance providers are willing to look for ways to tighten their belts, it’ll make it much more fiscally realistic.
WASHINGTON — President Obama will announce today that the health care industry will try to cut $2 trillion in expenses over the next decade to slow the rising cost of medical care, two White House officials familiar with the plan said.If successful, the cuts could help reduce costs for families and provide money for an expansion of health care coverage backed by Obama and some Democrats in Congress, said the officials, who briefed reporters but refused to be identified ahead of Obama’s announcement.
“If these savings are truly achieved, this may be the most significant development on the path to health care reform,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, which advocates for expanded health care coverage. “It would cut health costs for families and businesses, and it would enable adequate subsidies to be offered so that everyone has access to quality affordable health care.”
But there’s also another piece to this, and that’s the unity between the two sides of the health care debate…insurance providers and health care worker unions…
The President of the United States was able to get the major union associated with health care and the major lobby associated with health insurance companies to come together, under his aegis, at an event that White House hopes will be the public kick off of the president’s engagement with Congress as its committees write the health care bill. “This fundamentally allies these groups with the President’s goal of getting health care reform this year and that’s a game changer, in our opinion,” a senior administration official told reporters last night. “And it makes clearer than ever that health care reform is going to happen this year in Congress.”
So, is this the type of bridge building that this debate needs in order to pass legislation? Because if big business is behind this, won’t that give cover to some Republicans to join the Dems and vote this in?
More as it develops…
This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 and is filed under Health Care, Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 11th, 2009 at 8:44 am
If the health-care industry is serious about massive cost cutting, which I do not believe it is, it would be a case of the leopard changing its spots. The industry’s profits are substantially in the waste itself, so it is impossible to imagine such a transformation.
May 11th, 2009 at 9:29 am
Again, one small comment is indicative of one of the core problems with the GOP (and of course the anti-GOP meme-pushers): as long as the Republicans are the party of “big business,” they’ll never get back in the White House. They need to be the party of freedom, independence, reduced government interference, and at the same time put “big business” on notice that the American people won’t be held captive by government nor by industry.
May 11th, 2009 at 9:41 am
$2 trillion seems too high but if the captains of health care industry are in agreement than it is more believable.
Now I want to see what these reforms are.
Ryan
May 11th, 2009 at 10:48 am
The politics of this are fascinating. Big Health just dismissed their Republican allies. They fired their Congressional lackeys. Sorry, we are eliminating the position, you have til noon to clean out your desk. Yikes.
May 11th, 2009 at 11:45 am
$2 Trillion over ten years is $200 Billion per year. That’s less than 10% of current health care spending. They’re probably not talking about holding 2019 spending to 90% of 2008 spending, they’re probably talking about $2 Trillion less than projected spending. And since costs are supposed to go up 5% of GDP in the next ten years just holding cost increases to inflation probably accounts for most of the savings.
This is a good start. I’m not surprised the unions agreed to it. They maintain our high health costs are mostly due to the existence of private, for-profit, insurance companies. So they’re probably convinced they’ll come out of this fine. The insurance companies blame the hospitals. Hospitals blame insurance companies. The Doctors blame Med Schools, the Med Schools blame rising education costs and shrinking state subsidies for higher education. And Pharma’s too busy justifying drug prices to bother blaming anybody else.
The coalition is good because it means that when the plan actually comes out, and Pharma/unions/Doctors/etc. finally figure out they’re the ones who are getting screwed they’ll leave. But everyone else will support the plan strongly. They seem to have figured out that they can’t keep sucking up more and more of our economy. Most of them will be happy simply to get through the process unscathed.
May 11th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Everyone is going to get scathed.
May 11th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
This is all crap – nothing but wall dressing to silence the “single payer” advocates. As long as there are for profit entities operating at the pinnacle of the health care industry, and as long as they are able to make campaign contributions things won’t change. Another title for this post could have been, “Big pharma, Big Business and Big Healthcare Reach Accord to Change Absolutely Nothing but Token Reform for Atleast 10 Years”
May 11th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
I agree with Terence. The insurance companies, hospital corporations, Big Pharma and every other for profit involved in the current system are only trying to make themselves look good. Every promise they make will be broken. Every plan they propose will be all show and no substance. They only thing they care about are their profits and they couldn’t care less about the people who can’t afford health care.
May 11th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
I just want to bring up that it is NOT doctors making the bank in this country any longer. yes they make more than the average person, but they’re not pulling in millions. And I completely agree with Terence, there’s no way we can have health care reform when private for-profit companies are running our health care. Why the hell are we listening to an insurance company on what procedures we’re allowed to have?
May 12th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Promises, promises. This is nothing but noise. Note the complete lack of real detail in the “plan.” Some big corps would love to offload their HC costs onto the taxpayers. And some big health care corps and big pharma would love to see new money injected into the system. Especially when it comes with the ability to arbitrarily ration care in order to maintain their margins.
Anyone who thinks that any of this will actually cut OVERALL health care costs without some fairly extreme rationing is an idiot who can’t do basic math. $2 trillion? Steer manure. AT best even intelligent reform could only slow the rate of cost growth for a while, until the potential efficiencies were absorbed.