Health Care.....A Compromise is coming?

[orangeblooded2]

So it seems....



The president and White House aides have been talking with Senator Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican who has proposed to use the threat of a government plan to force private insurers to become more competitive and lower costs. If the insurance industry does not make changes within a certain amount of time, the government-run plan would be created.



Obama to stress common ground in health speech - The Boston Globe

 

[orangeblooded2]

I think a lot of Dems could live with this scenario.

 

[MG1968]

so, compromise is "do it our way, or else"?

no thanks.

 

[volinbham]

Sounds like a technicality to me. The government has all the power here - write the "rules" so that private insurers cannot comply then step in when the privateers inevitably fail. It's a smokescreen.

 

[rjd970]

Sounds like a technicality to me. The government has all the power here - write the "rules" so that private insurers cannot comply then step in when the privateers inevitably fail. It's a smokescreen.

A reasonable compromise would be to let the private insurance companies provide the service, and abolish the RUC (private interest group) wing of the AMA that that sets price. I posted a great article on this that nobody wanted to comment on:

Fundamentally, the entire payment model of American health care drives medical centers, doctors, and hospital managers to push for more fancy procedures at the expense of primary care doctors. How'd we get here? Since 1992, Medicare has depended almost entirely on the American Medical Association for guidance on how relative values should be set. In a devastating critique published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, scholars from the Urban Institute and the University of California-San Francisco explained that Medicare uncritically accepted 95 percent of the AMA's recommendations, which are formulated by the group's Relative Value Scale Update Committee, or RUC.

Of the committee's 29 members, 23 are appointed from subspecialties like cardiology and dermatology. Just three represent primary care, even though half of all Medicare dollars are spent on face-to-face encounters. Their meetings are closed to uninvited observers. Unsurprisingly, over time, the relative values of various procedures far outpaced face-to-face "evaluation and management." In 2000, for example, the RUC recommended relative value increases in 469 specialty procedure codes but made no change in codes related to evaluation and management—which are used by primary care doctors for outpatient visits for physicals, back pain, headaches, and so on.

The hidden public-private cartel that sets health care prices. - By Darshak Sanghavi - Slate Magazine