SOURCE Health Reforms May Hurt Uninsured - Study analyzes hospitals in California
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE - Saturday, January 30, 1993
Author: Jonathan Marshall, Chronicle Staff Writer
CIRCA 1993---Health care reforms under consideration by the Bill Clinton administration could backfire against uninsured patients, a new study of California hospitals suggests. A move in California in the 1980s to control the upward spiral of medical costs by encouraging price competition produced discounts of nearly 5 percent for paying patients, according to an analysis released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, an academic clearinghouse in Cambridge, Mass.
Price competition is a key element in ``managed competition’’ and ``managed care’’ scenarios being reviewed by a White House task force led by (a very ambitious First Lady) Hillary Clinton.
At the same time, however, the move to competition also slashed the amount of uncompensated care 36 percent from its expected value.
``The bottom line I want to push is that if you lower the price of care, it may . . . not be unambiguously good if it means kicking out the uninsured,’’ said Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist who authored the study. (snip) (no link)
My review of this group, The Alliance for Health Reform, is that it came out of the Rockefeller funding mechanism and foisted upon our government (behind the scenes) for the sole purpose to use so-called “healthcare reform” as a vehicle to overhaul the tax code.
It is all about the money and power, folks!