Obama outlines healthcare savings
President Obama today offered part two of his healthcare overhaul pitch, and provided more detail on his pledge to find another $300 billion in savings to help pay for it.
Last week, in a detailed two-page letter to key senators laying out his core principles for a healthcare bill, Obama said he wanted to cut an additional $200 billion to $300 billion from Medicare and Medicaid over the next decade, on top of the $309 billion reduction he had already proposed in the government's two main healthcare programs for the poor, elderly, and disabled.
In his weekly radio and Internet address today, he says, "I am announcing an additional $313 billion in savings that will rein in unnecessary spending, and increase efficiency and the quality of care – savings that will ensure that we have nearly $950 billion set aside to offset the cost of health care reform over the next ten years."
"These savings will come from commonsense changes," he adds. "For example if more Americans are insured, we can cut payments that help hospitals treat patients without health insurance. If the drug makers pay their fair share, we can cut government spending on prescription drugs. And if doctors have incentives to provide the best care instead of more care, we can help Americans avoid the unnecessary hospital stays, treatments, and tests that drive up costs."
The proposals include incorporating "productivity adjustments" into Medicare payment changes, reducing subsidies to hospitals for treating the uninsured, getting lower prices on Medicare prescription drugs, adjust payment rates for CT scans, adopting an independent panel's recommendations on payments to nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, and the old standby of cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse."
(To see a White House fact sheet on the proposal, click here.)
"These savings underscore the fact that securing quality, affordable health care for the American people is tied directly to insisting upon fiscal responsibility. And these savings are rooted in the same principle that must guide our broader approach to reform: we will fix what’s broken, while building upon what works. If you like your plan and your doctor, you can keep them -- the only changes that you’ll see are lower costs and better health care," the president says.
Obama, who held a town hall meeting this week on healthcare and has mobilized his grassroots organization to lobby Congress, acknowledged that many in Congress, which is working on drafting healthcare bills, and elsewhere "question whether we can afford to act this year."
"But the unmistakable truth is that it would be irresponsible to not act," he says. "We can’t keep shifting a growing burden to future generations. With each passing year, health care costs consume a larger share of our nation’s spending, and contribute to yawning deficits that we cannot control. So let me be clear: health care reform is not part of the problem when it comes to our fiscal future, it is a fundamental part of the solution."
The full address is below, and the video can be viewed here.
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Back in 1965, the original government projections for the cost Medicare by 1990 was supposed to be approx. $9 billion. The actual cost, as we now know, was in excess of $65 billion. By 1999, that rose to over $200 billion. I can't wait to see where this goes.
This is Prestidigitator Obama at his best. He says he is cutting costs out of one side of his mouth while he increases costs out of the other side. THese numbers are abunch of baloney, they are made up fantasies of "savings" that will be "used" to pay for Obama's "Healthcare Plan".
We have elected a community activist neophyte as President. He is going to do great damage to our economy and our country before he is gone on Jan. 20, 2013.
I'm confused by Richard's post. He is curious what great damage Obama is going to do to the economy and our country before 2013... what about the damage that Bush inflicted onto America? How much debt are we in simply because of the War in Iraq.. no matter where he left our economy when his last term ended..
2%-4% of Medicare dollars are spent on administrative fees. 25%-28% of private insurance healthcare dollars goes to administrative fees. Look it up for yourself. Total heath care costs in the USA are approx. 17% of USA gross domestic product of 14 trillion dollars, or 2.4 trillion dollars. So now you know why the health care industry (business) wants to keep things as they are.....Big money, big business. Insurance premiums are rising by approx. 20% per year with pre-existing conditions exclusions, huge executive pay, high deductables and rights to refuse your business. Is this your ideal?. Big business is between you and your doctor.
@markeyboy
You are such a communist. Yes, administrative fees are saddling everyone and making costs soar, but since when has the government ever been able to take over something and make it less expensive? Those administrative fees will only become bureaucratic fees and red tape in the end, funded by tax dollars (no matter what Dear Leader Obama says). I'd rather a for profit business to be between me and my doctor than the government and its ineptitude. At least businesses have market driven incentive to lower costs and become more efficient. And that preexisting condition argument is bunk...
Nothing good will come out of market driven health care. This is not about politics or name calling. Try switching health care insurers, and get thrown under the bus. You are more or less stuck with who you have. Do some research for yourself asking those who have done so or lost their job. They (insurance companies) gotcha because of pre-existing conditions. Communist? Bunk? Socialism perhaps, I don't think so? I am just an average American health care consumer. Health care insurance companies will only look for profit. I have never heard of any of them lowering premium costs...only raise executive pay. How can you even imply a private health insurance company is in the business of lowering costs to the insured. Now thats Bunk. How do health care insurers raise profit?........... Deny services, increase premiums at 10 times inflation rate, create approved non-approved formulary and non-formulary drug lists with higher copays, gradually increase deductables on new premium periods, deny services for pre-existing conditions....like smoking, broken leg, pregnancy, cancer, on and on. Yes how about market driven health care?....$12,000.00 for a non-smoking family of four + 20% premium increase per year. Thats what I see. Recent experience shows how the free market handled finance, mortgage industry, banking, investment, and gave us $4.25 gasoline.