Will the Deficit Save Health Reform? | The American Prospect

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=will_the_deficit_save_health_reform
Will the Deficit Save Health Reform? | The American Prospect

Despite the president's focus on health care as deficit reduction and evidence that the Congressional Budget Office, charged with discovering the costs of these bills, chronically overestimates the costs and underestimates the savings of health-care bills, most experts think that no feasible bill will bend the curve as much as is necessary to directly slow the increase in spending -- ironically, the cheapest option, single-payer, is politically toxic. Savings that do result from reform will be required to subsidize health care for most of the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance. But even this kind of health-care reform is important for reducing the long-term deficit.

First of all, reform will provide more information to policy-makers. Studies of comparative effectiveness and data from a public insurance plan will provide a deeper understanding of inefficiencies in the system and the solutions to those inefficiencies. The White House Council of Economic Advisers has also estimated that health-care reform will lead to increases in GDP, reaching over 2 percent in 2020 that would lead to proportional increases in tax revenue and lower deficits. But most important, eliminating the "crazy system of cross-subsidies," as Center for Budget and Policy Priorities economist Jim Horney calls the complex interweaving of publicly and privately subsidized care for the under- and uninsured, would create a much simpler framework for future cost-reduction efforts.

"It really is important to get universal or near-universal coverage in order to help create a system that is more sensible," Horney explains. "That system will help us to design [more efficient] reimbursement systems."

or we could just kill Medicare.