Medicare and the VA --> they don't want to fix it... they want to kill it...

I'm catching up on my Krugman...

Medicare and the VA

So we’ve been treated to lots of opinion pieces declaring that Medicare is doomed, doomed I tell you, and entitlements are out of control. And I had a thought.

You see, we actually have a real live case of impressive cost control in health care: the VA system. The CBO reports:

Adjusting for the changing mix of patients (using data on reliance and relative costs by priority group), the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that VHA’s budget authority per enrollee grew by 1.7 percent in real terms from 1999 to 2005 (0.3 percent annually).2 Though not the decline in cost per capita that is suggested by the unadjusted figures, that estimate still indicates some degree of cost control when compared with Medicare’s real rate of growth of 29.4 percent in cost per capita over that same period (4.4 percent per year).

So if you really think that Medicare as it is is doomed, why not propose converting it to a VA-type system as opposed to simply declaring it bankrupt and shutting it down? I mean, the standard argument — socialized medicine! loss of choice! — doesn’t seem to apply if the alternative is no health care at all.

But you know that the entitlements scaremongers won’t bite on this solution — because they don’t want to make social insurance affordable, they want to kill it.

That was kind of my point with the boy who cried deficit meme...

Every time I read a "the sky is falling" deficit (because of Obama) hawk... who at the the same time wants to continue the status quo health care crisis in complete disregard to the impacts that doing nothing have on the deficit i'm simply going to post the following... (if you are a blogger you might want to do the same--> I have no clout as a blogger... so I'm talking to myself)

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IOUSA Budget Deficit Calculator allows you to see what the projected U.S. budget deficit would be, as a percentage of GDP, if the United States had the same per person health care costs as various other countries which enjoy longer life expectancies than the United States.

The U.S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country but ranks 37 out of 191 countries according to its performance ---World Health Organization

Stand with Dean     

Having a philosophical objection to something but saying "you want to fix it" and yet consistently turn away from ideas that "would fix it" says you either don't understand policy or are putting your philosophy before good policy and hide behind the idea that it just can't be done.

Posted via web from Jim Nichols