Yesterday I suggested that if we really had to have a Supercommittee tasked with closing the long-term deficit further, it ought to be focused on healthcare since that’s where our long-term deficit problem lies. But I left it to healthcare experts to figure out just what the committee should do.
The first thing to keep in mind, of course, is that when it comes to Medicare about half of our future increases are due to an aging population. Unless you’re a big Soylent Green fan there’s just nothing we can do about that, so we should face reality and accept the need for a gradual increase in Medicare taxes (or some other funding source) to handle that.
But we can also save money by making Medicare more efficient. PPACA does some of this already, but what more could we do? Austin Frakt is an expert, and he has some ideas:
- More competitive bidding.
- Prescription drug formularies to reduce pharmaceutical costs to VA levels.
- Support comparative effectiveness research.
- Based on that research, insist on paying for only the cheapest effective treatments.
- Get tougher on setting rates for all healthcare providers, as the most efficient systems in other countries do.
- Etc.
There’s more at the link. If you want to get a handle on what we could do if we were really serious about cutting Medicare costs without sacrificing quality of care, it’s a good place to start.
