President Barack Obama will appear in Grand Junction today to talk about health care, and his appearance will undoubtedly prove yet again how important this debate is to Americans.
We hope those who attend Obama’s town hall, who are ostensibly concerned about the future of health care, will take this opportunity to dig into real issues and not engage in the theater of protest.
One thorny issue worthy of debate is the proposed transformation of MedPAC, currently a congressional advisory panel, into an executive branch agency.
MedPAC, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, would decide how much Medicare would pay doctors and hospitals for care. Getting Medicare costs under control is a vital part of any attempt to overhaul health care, and we think this is a reasonable proposal.
The country cannot go forward with the status quo. Rising health care costs are threatening to consume an ever larger portion of the federal budget and our wallets.
If nothing changes, federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid will escalate from about 5 percent of the gross domestic product today, to almost 10 percent by 2035, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.
Obama repeatedly has voiced his concerns about bringing down the costs of entitlements, including Medicare, to help control the federal deficit and stabilize the budget.
The president wants to give MedPAC a greater voice in determining how Medicare spends more than $450 billion annually.
Some federal lawmakers oppose the idea because it would wrest away their control of Medicare spending. They still would have the ability to override MedPAC’s decisions, but it would be in the form of a package as opposed to going over them line by line.
Hospitals and doctors are nervous about giving so much power to unelected officials. It’s understandable since Medicare reimbursement rates frequently determine whether certain hospitals make their bottom lines, and how many Medicare patients a physician can afford to see.
But we also see the value in distancing the process of Medicare spending from members of Congress who are more easily influenced by regional concerns and lobbyists who donate to their campaigns.
It’s impossible to entirely remove politics from such a process, but putting a little space between elected officials and medical spending decisions has its merits.
Health care policy experts, whose job it is to probe the efficacy of treatments and figure out efficiencies, surely seem better equipped than politicians to determine how our health care dollars should be spent.
It is, undoubtedly, something that ought to be discussed once we get past all the shouting.
