TV Monday morning
17 April
I am scheduled to be a guest on CNBC’s Squawk Box Monday morning, beginning around 7 AM EDT. Former Vermont Governor and DNC Chairman Howard Dean and I will be discussing health care, taxes, and spending.
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Keith,
If Dean trots out the usual talking points about achieving savings through healthcare reform, it would be great if you can challenge Dean to admit that, even if we achieve some healthcare efficiencies through digitization of medical records and other operational and healthcare management improvements (e.g., better data analysis for smarter decisions that are mostly “win-win”), plus whatever he presumes would be saved (net) by providing universal coverage (or perhaps even single payer) and ensuring better preventive care, we cannot bring down projected Medicare and Medicaid spending, overall entitlement spending and overall spending sufficiently to help solve our long-term fiscal imbalance without ACTUAL SACRIFICES among recipients (and would-be recipients) of entitlement benefits — e.g., means testing that excludes a significant percentage of seniors, raising the retirement age further for Social Security and Medicare, and/or reduction in benefit levels for both. Examples of the latter are changing the indexing for Social Security and reducing healthcare coverage under Medicare in some way, whether formally per the schedule of benefits and/or in practice via strict “managed care”, meaning policies designed to generate more denials of authorization for treatments on a case by case basis, and/or by, in effect, reducing accessibility to physicians and other healthcare professional or reducing the average quality of care, etc.
I am highly skeptical of claims that if we just achieve universal coverage (and perhaps single payer) and do smart things like digitizing medical records and providing preventive care, we can reduce projected entitlement spending enough that (in combination with Defense cuts they seek, higher taxation, and elimination of “waste, fraud and abuse”) we can solve our long-term fiscal imbalance problem without reducing benefit levels or eligibility vs. current law. I hope you get and take the chance to call Dean on this partisan fudge. If he has some credible, sufficiently thorough analysis to back up such a claim, let him cite it. If not, it means he either doesn’t know if such a claim is really valid or knows it isn’t.
I am setting the DVR, go get him!