Posted by
Always To The Right on Friday, October 10, 2008 6:11:30 PM
Obama’s will ensure that someone writes a check
to cover the high cost of your health care. But that someone will
probably be you. “Obama’s $2,500 Promise”
Health IT (including such innovations as electronic health records and
e-prescribing) is popular with politicians on both sides of the aisle
as the key to better care at lower cost. Anticipating big returns, the
Obama plan would spend $50 billion to promote health IT. A well-known
RAND study credits health IT with $77 billion in savings, but only
after 15 years of putting the infrastructure in place. Nonetheless, the
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says health IT will not produce
significant savings, at least in the near term. So for the foreseeable
future, this initiative will push costs up, not down.
The Obama plan would also create new subsidies to cover the uninsured
and help people facing high health costs. That, and the fact that we
can’t expect to see savings in the health sector that approach the
promises made by the campaign, will unavoidably mean higher taxes. The
Senator would increase the top two income tax brackets, raise the top
capital gains tax rate, raise the top dividends tax rate, increase
payroll taxes, and bring back the estate tax. According to the Urban
Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, those proposed tax
increases would yield an additional $600 billion in revenue — but only
over the next decade. That is not a great deal of new money for a major
expansion of health programs (much less for one costing several hundred
billion a year) and other initiatives supported by the candidate.
Sen.
Obama’s plan will ensure that someone writes a check to cover the high
cost of your health care. But that someone will probably be you.
Determining
which treatments work best for which patients, and doing a better job
of managing care is another worthwhile idea that is not likely to have
a quick payoff. It is often claimed that 30 percent of what we pay for
health care is wasteful and unnecessary. Comparative effectiveness
research could give us a basis for eliminating the unnecessary, but
only with the investment of many billions of dollars over a long
period. CBO finds only $6 billion in reduced health spending over the
next decade from such research. That’s less than a 0.05 percent
reduction in the $32 trillion that will be spent for health care during
that time.