$2Trillion projected on Medicare alone
The CMS released a staggering estimate for Medicare spending a decade from now– $2Trillion. And yes, on Medicare alone (not counting SCHIP, Medicaid, or any semblance of “universal healthcare”).
Are we willing to sacrifice the solvency of the taxpaying public so that the elderly can eat freely at the “free” table of medical expenditures? In my mind, this figure alone highlights the insanity of a defined benefit for medical care– and knocks any thoughts around expansion of government “insurance” programs out of the water.
Its a paradoxical situation– government control of medical costs per visit (via the RVUs and billing through CPT based claims coding) has systematically swapped out thought-driven primary care for technology driven specialty care. As overall cost increases, government hits cost/ time units harder and harder, incenting physicians to dispense with talking to patients at all, while freely paying for diagnostics and expensive specialty procedures. We’re now at a point where the strong controls on primary care time have made that practice virtually unaffordable and the specialists are driving us faster and faster to bankruptcy.
Is this the system we should bolt all future health expenditures through? Seems the low administrative costs of this pass-through system have allowed the wolves to raid the henhouse. Were it not for taxpayers being forced to pay into the system, it would have been tossed on the scrapheap long before, with something better at managing overall spend (likely through enhanced access to primary care and increased controls on specialty medicine) in its place.
