Ex-Medicare Chief Criticizes Obama, McCain Health Care Plans

By J.C. O'Connell

In order to make health care affordable, the system needs more efficiency — not just more cash or tax credits, Mark McClellan, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told a crowd of more than 200 statisticians on Monday in Colorado.

McClellan, a former associate professor of economics at Stanford University who has studied health care costs, was the keynote speaker for the five-day Joint Statistical Meetings conference. The annual conference, which attracted more than 5,000 statisticians in a variety of fields from across the country to the Colorado Convention Center, was organized by the American Statistical Association.

Neither presidential candidate’s proposed health care reform will pay for itself, but the real long-term solution to making health care more affordable is to make the system more efficient, a goal shared by both presidential candidates, said McClellan, brother of former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.

McClellan envisions an “electronic infrastructure,” built by private-public partnerships, that could collect data and make it available for analysis about which treatments are most effective for which patients.

“I think we’re headed for a new era of health care reform, one in which health care coverage reform is no longer separated from health care delivery reform,” he said.

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama’s plan to roll back tax cuts to the country’s wealthiest Americans and instead use the money to expand health care will save only about $50 billion a year, McClellan said, and won’t cover the rising price of health care for uninsured and under-insured Americans.

The cost of health care rose 6.7 percent in 2006 to $2.1 trillion and continues to increase, according to the American Medical Association.

Republican Sen. John McCain hasn’t proposed any significant health care spending but has proposed putting a cap on employer health care spending and using the additional revenue to pay for a health care tax credit for those residents who don’t get health insurance through their jobs, which still wouldn’t cover the rising cost of health care, said McClellan.

Read the rest of the article at the Colorado Independent.

Comments

[PatrickforO]

The thing we've all been missing here is that in a republic such as ours, ostensibly a representative democracy, either candidates' plan will ultimately change because of compromise. This is why I'm so disgusted most of the time with the mainstream media. They minimize the real issues in favor of generating controversy over things like lapel pins. Healthcare is the issue dearest to my heart, because it deeply offends me that I could go to Nigeria and get healthcare, but here is the USA, arguably the greatest civilization humankind has ever known, we have 1/6 of our population without this basic service. Obama knows his plan will change, because he knows that for any real change in this broken system, everyone is going to have to get around the table and compromise. At least he has a plan, and is committed to doing something. I fear that if McCain gets it, nothing will happen yet again, and this dream that we can actually fix this problem will fade silently into the night on Republican rhetoric and whisper campaigns.

[Triciann]

I think McCain will make matters worse by making it easier for employers not to participate in healthcare plans. I think people with pre-existing conditions will be the hardest hit. People in their 50's and 60's probably have the most to fear especially if they work for relatively small companies.

[brighterside]

I think that one strategy that O'bama should think of doing is actually embrace the Hillary health care plan and adopt it as his primary objective in implementing when it comes to universal health care.

This will put O'bama in fairly good standings with the Clintons and would be a step towards really uniting the democratic party. He should let Hillary sell her plan as her own to the masses and to give the message out that O'bama will adopt her plan if he is elected president.

O'bama also needs to get the word out that he plans to use Hillary's healthcare plan over his -- and to admit that she has had the better plan all along. He can also give Hillary's plan the stamp of approval by stating that Hillary will be part of his administration in implementing universal healthcare.

This way O'bama doesn't need to worry about implementing his own version which I think adds to the bureaucracy of government -- and Hillary will have a very strong position in implementing her healthcare plan as she see's fit.

This I think will help to reunite the party and will in some way discount some of the doubt that she still campaigning for the presidency.

[GabrielXL]

Uh... Unless I'm missing something, it appears that the party is uniting just fine behind Barack Obama without Hillary's Health Care Plan. The only holdouts are those who more than likely wouldn't vote for Obama anyway. Why anyone thinks Obama needs to pander to Hillary's supporters at this stage in the game is beyond me. First he needed to select her as V.P. (Doesn't look like that's going to happen.) Now he needs to let her sell her healthcare plan as opposed to his own. That doesn't make very much sense at all and if I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to happen either. But hey, embrace whatever floats your boat.

[psychmaj323]

No thank you, I don't want my check garnished if I can't pay. That's essentially her plan, mandated healthcare. If you don't pay there's a penalty.

[tompoe]

The FDA approval process could be tweaked just slightly, and the former government official, McClellan, could have his wish. In fact, by instituting a nonproprietary automated clinical data collection system, the FDA would be able to cut all drug research by 70% or more. They would then be able to implement an electronic monitoring of virtually tens of thousands of human clinical trials each year, using a relatively small staff. The original wording of the 1992 Accelerated Approval Policy called for this approach, and promised to provide the government a way to introduce a "controlled market place" based on the merits of the drug development, both before and after a product entered the market place.

Imagine this as a gigantic long-term study, where folks signed up to be followed medically over many years. Healthcare costs would drop precipitously, and quality of care would skyrocket, not to mention the ability to shift to a single payer system that would lower premiums (in the form of medicare insurance) for everyone.

Of course, McClellan knew all this before he made his absurd remarks, and chose to ignore it. Is it possible he just got caught up in the corruption that permeates every aspect of our present garbage dump of a healthcare system?

[lysistrata]

Ours is the only advanced nation with a private free market health care system. And as we all know, there is nothing better than the free market economy. Trouble is, the only part not private is MEDICARE, and that is the part that works best and could be better if we insured young and healthy people too. Right now private insurance corporations pick the young and healthy people out of the pool taking high premiums and paying little for health care, MEDICARE is then left with people with the most needs of medical care.

We need to spread the cost over lifetimes with no gaps due to unemployment and so forth.

[Viper]

Actually the privitized Medicare HMOs cost the governnment 15% more per person than Straight Medicare and pay the providers 25% less.

1) insurance companies get 50% of every healthcare dollar and treat no one. You cant cut healthcare cost almost in half by vetting rid of the middleman and expanding medicare healthcare to cover everyone.

2) We pay 3-4 times more for the same drug as the rest of the world. Only here are drugs free market. In the rest of the world the government sets the price. This we subsidize their healthcare costs. The pay way too littel and we pay way, way too much. We must set the prices just like in Canada and Europe in roder to reduce our healthcare cost.

Healthcare is not really free market. Providers dont set their rates. Most rates by even private insurance are now based on the medicare rates. Heck as baby boomers retire, medicare will be handling 30% of all insured and much more of the dollar cost.

Regards

[lysistrata]

Viper,

as you said the private HMO part of Medicare is expensive, so is the part D for prescription drugs. The insurance companies and pharmaceutical industries are in the drivers seat.
As long as private profit is more important than the nations health care nothing will change.

The European drug companies are making profits in Europe too, maybe not as much as they do in the US. They are big enough to take care of their interests.

[jmpurser]

"You can't get there from here" Mostly because we refuse to take the right road. Obama and McCain share the same "reform" approach that every other major candidate has: Subsidize the present system. Guess what? The current system is the problem. Throwing more money at it is not the solution. There is no evidence that anything except our current system is the problem. There is nothing magical about Americans that makes health care more expensive and less effective for them. The unique and special thing about Americans health care wise is our insistence on paying insurance companies rather than doctors and medical personnel.

[Triciann]

You seem to be suggesting a "no system" approach which wouldn't work, it would be going back to the first half of last century. Obama's plan is multidimensional and could lead to universal healthcare. To force universal healthcare doesn't work and imposing it at federal level would probably lead to chaos. No way of getting from the bottom to the top of a mountain without climbing it, and the shortest way is often the most difficult.