This article, from today’s New York Times, needs no introduction. Here’s an excerpt:
Roughly $2.5 trillion is at stake, the amount the nation spends each year on health care, nearly a fifth of the American economy. How that money is divided up — or prevented from rising at its current pace — is at the center of the debate. Many doctors, insurance companies and drug companies say they fear that their revenues could shrink significantly and patient care could be threatened.
Their arguments may prove to have merit. But “people are voting with their own economic interests,” said Les Funtleyder, a Wall Street analyst who is following the debate closely for Miller Tabak & Co. in New York.
And another:
What all of the interest groups reliably support is any new program that would expand coverage to the uninsured. Such a program would translate into tens of millions of new, paying customers for hospitals, doctors, insurers and drug makers.
But what worries those groups is the accompanying talk in Washington about how to address the skyrocketing cost of health care, since any decline in spending would correspond to a reduction in revenues. The discussion has become particularly heated over exactly how the government will find the savings necessary to help generate the $1 trillion or so that the government will need over the next decade to pay for universal coverage. The nation’s doctors, for example, say they wholeheartedly support health care reform. But the American Medical Association has a long history of being opposed to legislation that threatens the status quo. It opposed the creation of Medicare more than 30 years ago.
John Kitzhaber suggests that powerful stakeholders must set aside their self-interest long enough to agree on a goal. Then, they can resume their stakeholder viewpoint to negotiate their role in the transition to a new health system.
Read the whole story here.
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