Government health care, cost cutting, and quality of care

James Capretta:

"The Obama plan to cut Medicare’s reimbursement rates should be exhibit A in the case against ObamaCare. This is what governments do when they run health-insurance plans. They promise targeted 'reforms' to root out waste and inefficiency, but what they actually deliver is indiscriminate, across-the-board price controls that do nothing to change the underlying cost structure of health-care. These cuts won’t 'bend the cost-curve'; they will simply further widen the gap between public and private payment rates, thus shifting more of the costs to private premium payers.

President Obama and his aides have talked incessantly about how they want to even out regional disparities in spending that don’t produce better health outcomes. The emphasis should be on quality, not quantity. But their actual proposals make no such distinctions. The highest quality, lowest cost hospitals will get cut just as much as the highest cost, lowest quality hospitals. There’s no purchasing of 'value.' It’s reimbursement cuts for everyone, no matter how well or badly they treat patients.

None of this should be surprising, though. The idea that the government could hire a bunch of analysts to run the U.S. health-care system from Washington with precise and painless efficiency was always a fiction. The only reliable and lasting way to drive greater efficiency in health-care is with cost-conscious consumers in a reformed marketplace. Absent that, the government will always resort to arbitrary cost-cutting to meet budget targets, with no distinction made between high-value and low-value care. And with price cuts come waiting lists and queues. Call it ObamaCare."