Morning Bell: Obama Trek: The Search for More Money
Conn Carroll /
Yesterday, in what President Barack Obama described as a “watershed event”, the health care industry promised to cut $2 trillion in costs over 10 years by implementing such measures as the use of health information technology, care coordination, disease management, and “evidence based” medicine. If you feel as though you’ve seen this movie before, that is because you have: these are the exact same cost-cutting proposals that were in the Obama administration budget released earlier this year. So much for a watershed.
But Obama’s big announcement yesterday is actually a remake of an even older idea. Reacting to the Obama administration’s health care event, former-President Jimmy Carter aide and Brookings Institution health economist Henry Aaron told the New York Times: “I had a Rip van Winkle moment, as if I had fallen asleep in 1977 and woke up again this morning.” And just as with the Carter administration, don’t expect these health care savings to ever actually materialize. Former director of the Congressional Budget Office Robert Reischauer told the Washington Post: “It would be difficult to wring 1.5 percentage points out of this list of proposals.” Boston University health policy professor Alan Sager was even less kind, calling the Obama event, “An unrivaled set of abstractions and posturing.”