The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the government deficit will exceed one and a half trillion dollars this year, with federal health care annual expenditures expected to hit the trillion dollar mark by 2012. The largest federal health care program is, of course, Medicare, with costs projected to be close to $600 billion in 2012, and growing at around seven percent a year thereafter, although forecast to drop to a mere six percent annual increase if and when the Accountable Care Act is fully implemented.
Republicans and Democrats have each offered proposals to reduce projected Medicare expenditures, Republicans by shifting much of the cost of the program to beneficiaries, Democrats by passing responsibility to the already hobbled and politically endangered Independent Payment Advisory Board. Neither proposal has any realistic chance of passage.
Maybe it’s time to blow the cobwebs off the 1999 proposal from the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare.
The Commission, co-chaired by Democratic Senator John Breaux and Republican Representative Bill Thomas, was created by Congress as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, back when bipartisan cooperation was still sometimes possible. The Commission spent nine months examining Medicare’s program structure and costs and alternative approaches to reform, with the two co-chairs issuing their joint recommendation in March 1999. The co-chairs’ recommendation was, however, supported by only ten of the seventeen Commission members, one short of the number required for formal adoption, with the more liberal members generally opposed to the proposal’s cost control approach. Ironically—in the light of subsequent economic events—one key reason for the failure of the co-chairs’ proposal to gain more support was the booming economy of the later Clinton years, combined with the success of already enacted program changes dictated by the Balanced Budget Act.
Despite its failure to achieve the two-thirds majority needed for adoption, the 1999 proposal includes some recommendations that together look more practicable and potentially more politically acceptable than those of either Representative Ryan’s Republican plan or President Obama’s Democratic proposal:Continue reading…
