CBO chief: Deficit problem really comes down to health care costs

MSNBC Reports:

"The day after the Congressional Budget Office released its new estimate of a $1.5 trillion budget deficit for this fiscal year, CBO chief Douglas Elmendorf told the Senate Budget Committee that health care is the biggest driver of the budget problem."

William Hsiao’s single payer proposal for Vermont

From PNHP's Official Blog:

"Although advocates of the pure single payer model will find some problems with this report on a reform proposal for Vermont, there is very good news in this analysis. The report emphatically confirms the superiority of the single payer model in ensuring that everyone is included while containing health care costs."

Full report – William Hsiao, Steven Kappel and Jonathan Gruber (138 page PDF):

Read William Hsiao's statement and PNHP's analysis here.

Way to go Vermont!

Health Care: Feel the Fraudulence

Krugman debunks the GOP lies about the health care costs.

Health care around the globe

A look at how other developed countries provide and pay for health care compared with the U.S. system, based on the most recent information available:

Well done and worth the time to review. Read it all at USATODAY.com

CBO: Public Option Would Reduce Premiums Across The Board

From OurFuture.org

The CBO recently published a new letter on health care reform. They were asked to evaluate the impact of the weak (level playing field) public option in the Senate HELP committee's bill. Their conclusion was that the competitive pressure from the public option "would probably lower private premiums in the insurance exchanges to a small degree," and with a public plan in the exchange "the costs and premiums of competing private plans would, on average, be slightly lower than if no public plan was available." By reduce the cost of buying private insurance on the exchange, a public plan, "would tend to lower federal subsidy payments through the exchanges."

It is important to remember that the premimums for an average health insurance plan for a family of four is $13,000 a year. Even reducing the cost by a very small 4% would saving a family $520.

The benefits of the public option would not be restricted to just the minority of people who choose to sign up for it. The public option would also reduce premiums for those choosing private plans. The public option would also reduce the overall government cost of health care reform.

Progressives are not fighting for a public option for some purely ideological reason. They are fighting for it because Congress' own budget office concluded that even a weak public option would reduce the cost of health care reform and would save millions of Americans billions of dollars on their health insurance premiums, regardless if they select a private or public plan. A public option is both a smart and a very popular idea.

Can We Afford Health Care Reform? We Can't Afford Not to Do It.

Put another way, if you are for fiscal discipline, you should be for health-care reform. If our government cannot produce some kind of reform, that will only reinforce the perception that our political system is incapable of resolving our largest, most difficult problem -- and that is what will make investors think twice about investing in America.

Read it all at washingtonpost.com

The Public Option and Real Health Reform

If you haven’t already, read Atul Gawande’s piece on health reform in the New Yorker, largely centered around McAllen, Texas, the community in America with the highest health care costs.

I agree with Gawande that we could end up with a public health insurance option that doesn’t foster the right incentives to control costs, and that wouldn’t be a big victory. But while Gawande is proposing some kind of outside board to control these incentives, I wonder if the public health insurance option isn’t the place where these reforms are put into action.

Think about it: One advantage to a public health insurance option is that it is transparent. Private insurance doesn’t tell you what they pay for services, how often these services are used, and whether these services have improved patient outcomes. A public health insurance option could make that data available and work with it to improve care and control costs. This data would put the public health insurance option in the perfect position to figure out why some places in America cost so much more and why their outcomes aren’t any better, and how to fix that.

We must get costs down, that much is clear. We need the tools to do it. I’m pretty convinced the public health insurance option can be at least a crucial part of that toolset.

Read More at The Seminal