From the relentless drone of ‘where are the jobs, Mr. President?’ to the misguided fear mongering of ‘death panels for Grandma’ administered by un-elected, faceless bureaucrats to the de facto death of American Democracy itself the attacks on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), flawed indeed as it is, is starting to log results, some of them are quite impressive as noted by a recent piece at Morning Consult titled: ‘Trustees: Medicare Savings Recommendations Forestalled’.
This morning Brookings in association with the American Enterprise Institute and the Schaeffer Initiative for Innovation in Health Policy at the University of Southern California hosted ‘The 2016 Medicare Trustees Report: One year closer to IPAB cuts?‘.
The event is summarized by its organizers as:
For most of the last five decades, the most-discussed finding by the Medicare trustees has been the insolvency date, when Medicare’s trust fund would no longer be able to pay all of the program’s costs. Last year’s report projected that the hospital insurance trust fund would be depleted by 2030 – just 14 years from now. The report also predicted a more immediate and controversial event: the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), famously nicknamed “death panels,” would be required to submit proposals to reduce Medicare spending in 2018, with the reductions taking place in 2019. Do we remain on this path to automatic Medicare cuts next year?
The American Enterprise Institute and the Schaeffer Initiative for Innovation in Health Policy, a collaboration between the USC Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics and the Brookings Institution, hosted a discussion of the new 2016 trustees report on June 23. Medicare’s Chief Actuary Paul Spitalnic summarized the key findings followed by a panel of experts who discussed the potential consequences of the report for policy actions that might be taken to improve the program’s fiscal condition. You can join the conversation at #MedicareReport.
In the tsunami of misrepresentation and outright deception of the many moving parts of the ACA the ultimate barometer of success – at least from the health policy perspective – is the forecasted effect the law was to have on the U.S. Treasury, i.e., it will bankrupt the country and undermine the roots of our pluralistic healthcare ecosystem, replacing it with a ‘top down’ Government run Federal quagmire.
EDITOR’s NOTE: for the Acting CMS Administrator’s take on the Federally Faciliated and State Run ‘Marketplace’, check out Andy Slavitt’s recap via ‘Marketplace Year 3: Issuer Insights and Innovation (Part 3)‘.
Well the ACA results are in and the truth be told, while not a sealed trend (there are both headwinds and macroeconomic wildcards in the mix), the data is ‘encouraging‘.
Enjoy the audio!
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