ew writers on economics are able to say more in about 700 words than James Surowiecki of The New Yorker. He’s done it again in the current issue,
Perhaps not too oddly, he’s in sympathy with some of the points brought up by the budget-bashing Baconauts and Boomergeddons, not to mention the Big Bacon himself. “Multitrillion-dollar piles of debt have a way of making people nervous . . .” he writes. Yet he takes the worry a little farther by noting that Washington doesn’t have a spending problem per se but a health-care problem. Medicare, Medicaid and tax subsidies for employers who provide insurance are rising faster than just about any other expense.
He says insurance companies are not the real driver of costs (I have often said they are). He says health care providers are, namely hospitals, MRI tests, drugs and doctor’s exams. The fee for service system, not to mention CYA for malpractice, means that lots of uneeded tests are ordered, leading to complaints about waste and inefficiency you see here on this blog
How to go about it? Surowiecki tears apart the proposal of Congressman Paul Ryan, the darling of the New Right, to go to vouchers for Medicare. All that is a shell game that would mean tax payers pay less and seniors pay more out of their own pockets. If you buy into the Boomergeddons who have made fright about future debts a religion, Granny and Grandpa are going to have a lot less extra pocket change to bear the increased cost to them that vouchers would bring. Since many readers of this blog are a a few years ago from Granny and Grandpa, wake up! They are talking about us! So, a camp believes that seniors should be protected.
“The ideal system, for most voters, would guarantee all seniors reasonable health care, stop the debt from getting out of control, and keep paying health-care providers as before. The problem is that you can only do two of those things at once.”
Therein lies the rub.