What could bring health insurers, doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies together with big labor? A promise to save $2 trillion over the next decade. Michael Cannon at the Cato Institute says the motivation may be to get the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to skip the math on health reform proposals in Washington.
A good rule in politics is that if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Lobbyists don’t simply propose to reduce their members’ incomes. If they did, they would be fired and replaced with different lobbyists.
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Don’t call it cooking the books. Call it the new math of universal coverage.
The best way to bring about health reform is not to search for chimerical savings and impossible alliances, but to put more power in the hands of consumers. They are their own best advocates, as I show in the current issue of the North Carolina Medical Journal.
