One of the biggest flashpoints in the coming congressional health care debate will be how much money can be saved by reforming the nation’s presently broken system. The White House budget included $634 billion over 10 years for health reform, paid for by in part by trimming the system’s existing payments to insurance companies, doctors, and drug-makers.
Not surprisingly, the same industries in line for a fiscal whacking to help fund the health care bill are hoping that Congress gets a little more creative with its attempts to pay for the measure.
Thanks to Ezra Klein, we see insurers (Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield), the pharmaceutical industry’s trade group, and the American Medical Association signing on to a letter that urges congressional budget chairmen “develop a more flexible approach to pay-as-you-go for health care reform.”
Pay-as-you-go is the congressional budget principle that calls for offsetting all new spending with an equal amount of cuts — keeping the national ledger balanced, in essense. The ideal “flexible approach,” to paying for health care, the letter-writers continue, would be one that “reaffirms the importance of offsets but accommodates the need for significant short-term expenditures that will help set the health system on a path toward significant long-term savings and improvement in the long-run fiscal future of our country.”
One of the budget chairmen who received that letter is Sen. Kent Conrad (ND), who sounded a big note of alarm just yesterday on the general price tag of health care, without even beginning to touch the method of paying for it.
“When I hear, ‘we’re not going to see any savings [from health care] for 10 years,’ I become skeptical … [and ask] ‘is this really a move to save money?’,” Conrad told reporters yesterday after his committee heard testimony on the health care budget.
So you have powerful interest groups urging the Hill’s budget-writers to accept hefty early spending that would pay off further down the line, while one of those same budget-writers wonders why more savings can’t be had earlier. Sounds like a push-pull dynamic may be developing …
