The Majority keeps holding hearings on supposedly bipartisan reform ideas, but over and over, it’s the same song and dance: cut benefits and shift costs to the poor and elderly.
These reforms were offered by the President in the spirit of a grand, balanced bargain. That package had shared sacrifice, and included spending cuts and revenue increases. When cherry-picked, they are nothing more than partisan cuts.
How many times and in how many ways can we rehash the same idea? We keep trying to get blood from a stone. Fifty percent of Medicare beneficiaries have annual incomes at or below $22,500. Our seniors, our parents and grandparents, fifty percent of them are living barely above the poverty line. They should not be our “go-to" source for savings.
We are long overdue in fixing the physician payment system and I sincerely hope we can work in a bipartisan fashion to do so. In particular, we need to address inequities in payment for primary care physicians. And we need to do so in a way that encourages the efficient delivery of health care, so that we are pushing more of the right kind of care, not just more care overall.
But let’s be clear, it is the physicians who are driving the health care utilization in the system, not the beneficiaries. The notion that beneficiaries need to have more “skin in the game" to encourage smarter health care shopping is ridiculous. When your doctor tells you that you need an extra test or to come back in two weeks, do you poll other doctors to see if they agree? Of course not. There is a major information asymmetry between doctors and patients, and a necessity to trust physician judgment.
