"deficit reduction" is mostly just a disguise for class warfare against the working class

[Better Believe It]

Catfood Commission Backs Myth That We Must Increase Health Care Cost Sharing
By: Jon Walker
December 1, 2010

Beyond the Deficit Commission’s non-report total cop-out on health care, what disturbs me is what changes they do recommend: embracing the economagic myth that the way to control health care costs is just to make regular people pay even higher co-pays, deductibles, and out of pocket costs. This idea that we can reduce overall health care spending by making people pay even more is pure economic theology. It is support by free-marketeers like a religious doctrine despite the fact that all evidence shows it is not successful.

Making regular people pay more for health care does not control cost

Looking back at America’s health care over the past few decades, or at a comparison of health care costs among industrialized nations, the foolishness of this thinking becomes clear. Over the past two decades, most Americans have seen their co-pays, deductibles, and premiums grow sharply, yet we still have the most expensive health care with costs growing far beyond the rate of inflation.

Not surprisingly, many of the Catfood Commission’s recommendations to reduce health care costs are wholly based on this economic theology. This includes proposals to increase cost-sharing in Medicare, end “first dollar” Medigap coverage, and change the way federal employee health care works. For example, from the draft:

Reform Medicare cost-sharing rules.
(Saves $10 billion in 2015, $110 billion through 2020)

Currently, Medicare beneficiaries must navigate a hodge-podge of premiums, deductibles, and copays that offer neither spending predictability nor protection from catastrophic financial risk. Because cost-sharing for most medical services is low, the benefit structure encourages over-utilization of health care.

The logic is effectively that senior citizens on fixed incomes so love colonoscopies and hernia surgeries that they are getting unnecessary ones just for fun but would stop if they had a higher co-pay. Of course, the reality is that most people don’t like going to the doctor, and, due to their lack of medical knowledge, undergo whatever medical treatment the doctor orders.

While the national and international health care data fails to support this line of thinking, it is useful as a justification for the commission’s desire to force regular Americans to pay more for health care while keeping taxes for the wealthy very low. Just a reminder that “deficit reduction” is mostly just a disguise for class warfare against the working class.

Read the full article at:

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/12/01/catfood-commission-backs-myth-that-we-must-increase-health-care-cost-sharing/

[truedelphi]

1. How very correct is the logic of this piece.

I was watching C Span one day during summer of 2009.

The mike was left on and two Senators on Baucus committee were talking about the health care reform efforts. The efforts had been dragging on all summer, in part so that the Big Pharma and Big Insurers would have nothing to fear.

The two w4erre very conservative senators, and one said to the other, "Once this Health care reform is over with, we probably will "help out the country" by
"reforming" Social Security."

The two guys looked like they had just laid discovered the goose that laid the golden egg.

They understood that before you undertake any official plundering of the middle incomed household, you need to have the "word disguise" in place.

[leftstreet]

2. K&R

[girl gone mad]

3. Deficits should be our last concern so long as unemployment remains high.

Inflation is not a threat any country with 20% unemployment and massive underutilized productive capacity should take seriously.

[DirkGently]

4. Nothing could be clearer. nt