Rush to Rationing

Campus Report ^ | September 30, 2009 | Brittany Fortier

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Rush to Rationing

by: Brittany Fortier, September 30, 2009

Health Care Industry leaders are bent on transforming America’s doctor’s offices but vague on what will happen to folks in the lobby. On September 3, 2009, a panel discussed their expectations for the next 100 days of the debate.

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, President of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, on a September 3, 2009 panel hosted by the Alliance for Health Reform (AHR), said that this is a “crucial time” to be having the health care discussion. She added that “having the equivalent of 24 states” without health care coverage was “unacceptable.” Actually, past Chiefs of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) claim that the high end estimates of the uninsured population are way off.

Lavizzo-Mourey further opined that “if we don’t take action, we’re going to have more uninsured, higher costs and probably higher costs of the government as we need more people to be enrolled in Medicaid.”

For her part, Gail Wilensky, a Senior Fellow at Project HOPE and former chairman of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission and former administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration (now Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), described the challenges in reforming Medicare as a “metaphor” for the challenges facing health care in general.

“The Medicare program has a clear sustainability issue,” she said. “It has made promises [that] it is not in a position to fund as of yet…In some ways, it is lagging further behind the rest of health care in terms of moving toward integrated delivery systems and more management of chronic disease.”...