How the Medical Establishment Got the Treasury’s Keys

[jsr]

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/how-the-medical-establishment-got-the-treasurys-keys/

How the Medical Establishment Got the Treasury’s Keys
Uwe E. Reinhardt

About half a century ago, organized medicine and the hospital industry in this country struck a deal with Congress that in retrospect seems as audacious as it seems incredible: Congress was asked to surrender to these industries the keys to the United States Treasury.

In return, the industries would allow Congress to pass a 1965 amendment to the Social Security Act, described as “an act to provide a hospital insurance program for the aged under the Social Security Act with a supplementary health benefits program and an expanded program of medical assistance, to increase benefits under the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance System, to improve the Federal-State public assistance programs, and for other purposes.” We have come to know it as Medicare.

As Wilbur Cohen, a chief architect of the law and subsequently secretary of health, education and welfare, later described the deal (Page 25):

The sponsors of Medicare, myself included, had to concede in 1965 that there would be no real controls over hospitals and physicians. I was required to promise before the final vote in the executive session of the House Ways and Means Committee that the federal agency [to be in charge of administering Medicare] would exercise no control.

[Autumn]

1. Very interesting. Glad I looked in here.

rec

[bemildred]

2. And they had that power even back then. nt