sds:
I know the good doctor Jay Parkinson has addressed this before, but I think it’s worth taking another look.Some interesting tidbits from this post (all David Brooks) (emphases mine):
…from a section in which the C.B.O. analyzes what the House plan, with the strong public program and all the rest, would do to health care inflation:
The net cost of the coverage provisions would be growing at a rate of more than 8 percent per year in nominal terms between 2017 and 2019; we would anticipate a similar trend in the subsequent decade.
This is devastating. The plan was sold as a way to bend the cost curve, to reduce the rate of health care cost growth. Instead, the cost of the plan to the federal budget would rise by 8 percent a year, and there wouldn’t be anything close to offsetting revenues to pay for it.
This is a loud trumpet for all health care reformers. Start over. Get serious about costs. We can either pass this kind of reform and bankrupt the country or we can pass another kind of reform. End of story. […]
I’m not crazy about the public plan. I dislike the idea of the government competing in a marketplace it regulates. I think the temptation to subsidize the public entity will be overwhelming. But I’m not vociferously against it either. That’s because:
A.) I’m not that thrilled with the insurance companies.
B.) I think it will save money, but not that much (the C.B.O. agrees).
C.) (!) I think it will produce small administrative efficiencies.
Democratic politicians throw around statistics claiming that Medicare has much, much lower administrative costs than private insurers. I’ve been told by various economists that this claim is three-quarters trickery. It’s a lot cheaper to administer a targeted population that uses a lot of care than it is to administer a large population that uses little care per capita. Plus you can save a lot of administrative costs if you don’t actually regulate treatments that much.
