Blue Dog Rep. Jim Marshall (D-GA) appeared on Fox this afternoon, and compared the current health care system — including Medicare and Medicaid — to the Soviet Union.
“We’ve got this sort of central payment system, which is a fundamental problem. It’s health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, making the payments, and we’ve got consumers and doctors pretty divorced from the costs associated with the decisions that are being made,” said Marshall. “As a result, we’ve had an explosion in cost. I think we’ve got to see a fundamental change in the system that we’ve got right now for payment. If we don’t do that, we’ll continue to have opportunities to fix waste, fraud and abuse, because systems that are centrally planned and controlled — like the Soviet system — are just full of those kinds of issues.”
Marshall has previously made this comparison, saying back in September: “Beginning in World War II, American health care gradually migrated to an inefficient, Soviet-style system of central control and planning provided by health insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid.”
