Advice for Healthcare Reformers

Our nation's healthcare system as been referred to with many labels: "broken" and "unsustainable" are two that there seems to be little argument about. Our President and the Legislature have been insisting that reform is not only necessary but imminent. It's going to happen, it's just a question of when. Healthcare reform is paramount, they say, because healthcare costs are rising as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at an unsustainable rate.

But more recently, a growing number of Americans have been expressing their concerns about the cost of "reform". On July 14, when the Congressional Budget Office issued its nonpartisan assessment that the latest healthcare reform bill being submitted would not only increase the national debt by over a trillion dollars over the next 10 years, but also that there would be no cap on that figure (meaning, it could be even more expensive), it dealt the supporters of big change in healthcare a significant setback. The original letter from the CBO is here.

In order to rebuild the American people's confidence that Washington can reform healthcare, my advice is to start with two human service programs it already manages on our behalf: Medicare and Social Security. Here's a chart that illustrates my point (click on it for a larger version):

[source data: Office of Management and Budget, Historical Federal Outlays, 1962-2008]

Side note: wherever possible, the data I present here are from primary source material. I am not giving you data regurgitated from a talking head somewhere. These are the data from the original sources. You can (and should) look this material up yourself and get informed.

If this truly is the time to reform healthcare, and our current slate of Representatives, Senators, and President are the people to do it, can they start by reforming a program already fully under their control? Show us how efficiently Medicare can be run, and how well costs can be controlled through efficiencies, then we will gladly buy into a new government-reformed healthcare system. Show us Medicare's costs can be contained; it's already the largest consumer of healthcare in the nation, and wholly under Federal control.

I believe that if Medicare or Social Security become models of government management excellence, then the American people will have no reason to fear that the system we have, as "broken" and "unsustainable" as it may be, will be worse off when Washington "reforms" it.