While making the rounds of Town Hall meetings throughout Fairfield County, Congressman Jim Himes expressed strong support not only for health care reform, but also for the public option. His general support of the public option is encouraging and important to getting the bill passed.
What's confusing, however, is that Himes tends to withhold full support for HR 3200 because he says it doesn't do a good job of cutting costs.
"The bill is lazy and long-term untenable in respect to cutting costs," he said. "We have not taken up the hard and terribly necessary work of figuring out a way to create a system that incentivizes citizens to be healthier and incentivizes the whole process to keep us healthy. Right now, everyone is paid to fix us when we're broken. Nobody is paid anything to teach us how to be healthy."
Actually, HR 3200 includes a number of measures aimed specifically at what he's talking about. In the Kaiser Foundation's summary of the bill, it lists several "cost containment" measures as well as prevention/"quality" measures. Here are a few:
Modify provider payments under Medicare including:
- Modify market basket updates to account for productivity improvements for inpatient hospital, home health, skilled nursing facility, and other Medicare providers; and
- Reduce payments for potentially preventable hospital readmissions. [...]
Develop a national strategy to improve the nation's health through evidenced-based clinical and community-based prevention and wellness activities. Create task forces on Clinical Preventive Services and Community Preventive Services to develop, update, and disseminate evidenced-based recommendations on the use of clinical and community prevention services.
Improve prevention by covering only proven preventive services in Medicare and Medicaid. Eliminate any cost-sharing for preventive services in Medicare and increase Medicare payments for certain preventive services to 100% of actual charges or fee schedule rates.
There are several more such items listed, but these never seem to come up in any of Congressman Himes' discussions. It's commendable that Himes would like to see more cost-cutting and prevention measures in the bill. But I wish he would share some of his cost-cutting ideas with us rather than give the impression that bill contains no cost-cutting or prevention measures at all.
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