In addition to noting that Congress must raise the debt limit, and quickly, Doug Holtz-Eakin also vouched for the House GOP Budget, and in particular its prescription to privatize and cut the cost of Medicare.
In a brief interview Tuesday, Holtz-Eakin — who headed the Congressional Budget Office during the Bush administration, and was John McCain’s chief economic adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign — called the plan “a significant and serious proposal.”
“The most important thing about what’s in the House plan is in fact we finally have a budget limit,” he said. “For Medicare you say here’s the budget, go be efficient. For Medicaid you cap the taxpayers exposure and you give it to the states with a lot of flexibility and say go be efficient and those may not be perfect proposals, but we do in fact ultimately force our decision-making into a budget.”
If the growth of health care costs isn’t slowed by other policy means, the federal government will likely have to impose limits on Medicare and Medicaid spending in the future, or the country will face fiscal crisis. That could be done in concert with existing government programs, to limit the services the government will cover, and to move away from a strict fee-for-service system where the government simply pays for all the services providers order. The GOP budget outsources those decisions to private insurance companies.
“I think you should design your form knowing the endgame,” Holtz-Eakin said. “And one of the endgames in the American health care system is end-of-life care and we are never going to accept, I don’t think, as a society, those end-of-life decisions being made by anybody but the family. So I want to put the money there. That’s what [the GOP budget] is doing.”
Does he really think insurance companies will offer seniors plans that provide generous end-of-life benefits?
“Yeah — go give them some variety, and people will buy the things they like,” he added. “I think it’s a significant and serious proposal.”
