Lately I’ve been overwhelmed with work and personal obligations that have precluded my doing much commenting let alone writing new posts. I’d intended to compile a timeline of healthcare reform but the Kaiser Family Foundation has done it for me. You might want to cruise on over there and take a look at it.
There’s one date critical to the discussion of healthcare in the United States that’s been omitted from their timeline. In a little less than two months the Medicare trustees will produce their annual report on the state of Medicare. As a consequence of revenues that haven’t met their projections and outlays that have exceeded their projections I expect that the report will project actuarial insolvency, the point at which the trust fund (maintained by law in the form of federal government bonds) will be completely depleted, for the fund will occur within five years rather than the ten years that lawmakers have been assuming.
Over at Outside the Beltway James Joyner has noted that this year Social Security outlays have exceeded revenues, a portent of things to come. That imbalance occurred two years ago in Medicare Part A (the part that pays hospitals) and the hypothetical Medicare trust fund was predicted to have been completely depleted and in actuarial imbalance by 2017 last year.
Correcting Social Security’s imbalance between revenues and outlays will be easy relative to doing so for Medicare.
For the last ten years Congress has been reluctant to decrease the Medicare compensation rate for hospitals and doctors as they have been required to do by law. This hasn’t stopped Congress from directing that these and other equally or even more unlikely measures will actually produce reductions in healthcare spending.
I’m sure that my Congressman, flushed with the victory of having enacted a great expansion in the federal government’s obligations in healthcare spending as healthcare reform, would like to rest on his laurels and forget about healthcare reform for a while. I doubt that he’ll be allowed to. Medicare is already perched between insolvency and unavailability and the healthcare reform bill will in all likelihood merely accelerate its problems.
Whether we or the Congress like it or not the fight for healthcare reform has just begun. The low-hanging fruit has already been plucked to support the expansion of coverage and it will only get tougher from here on out.
It has long been my belief that passing health care reform was important so that we could start on health care reform. There is so much to be done, it could not be done in one bill. What really needed to be done was so radical as to be politically not feasible. Now that we will focus on costs, maybe we can have both parties engaged honestly. (Yeah, I know, I know.)
Steve
“It has long been my belief that passing health care reform was important so that we could start on health care reform.”
I think I’ve seen more bizarre logic, I just can’t remember when.
steve,
When will there be political support for more reform considering the political capital this reform sucked up over the last year? Also consider how this legislation’s been sold to the public as the “fix” for the system that’s been a 100 years in the waiting.