In his blog post on Blue Oregon, Steve Novick joins President Obama and former Oregon governor John Kitzhaber in declaring that we can’t do health reform without addressing the cost of care.
Here’s how he begins:
As the health care battle rages on, I suggest that everyone who has not already done so take the time to read this New Yorker article by Atul Gawande from June 1.
Gawande set out to figure out why the per-capita costs of Medicare are unusually high in McAllen, Texas. He concludes that the medical industry in McAllen – hospitals, doctors, everyone – has just been unusually aggressive in exploiting a basic fact of the entire industry: the more procedures you perform, the more drugs you prescribe, the more tests you run, the more you get paid – and that is true, for the most part, regardless of the effectiveness of the procedures, drugs and tests. It is also true in the context of Medicare – a ‘single payer’ ‘public option’ – as well as in the private sector context. Medicare has lower administrative costs than private insurance, but it still suffers from the perverse incentives of a fee-for-service system.
Gawande observes that the real question is not why McAllen is like McAllen; the question is why EVERYWHERE is not like McAllen, because the basic incentives are the same everywhere. There are places like the Mayo Clinic where doctors are on salary and the general structure is set up to maximize health while minimizing costs. But they’re swimming against the current.
Read the whole post here.
Steve Novick recently came in a close second in the Democratic Party primary for Oregon Senator.
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