Huzzah! Healthcare Reform!

From The Hill:

President Obama will announce an initiative Monday that the administration says will reduce national healthcare spending by $2 trillion over 10 years.

A coalition of six interest groups representing healthcare companies and a labor union are behind the plan. Their chief executives will meet with the president Monday to present him with a written commitment to cut the rate of growth in healthcare spending by 1.5 percentage points each year for 10 years.

We won! Well, in that an industry group is proposing voluntary measures to reduce their costs (oh, sorry, to cut the rate of growth) by increasing efficiency in the belief that will somehow translate to lower fees somewhere down the line.

The White House provided few details about how the savings will be achieved and acknowledged that, as a voluntary effort by private sector entities, there is no formal means of enforcing their pledge.

No worries, though. Surely Congress will step up and make new laws to regulate the health care industry, especially when they have a blueprint written by ... well, the health care industry.

Many of the policies the interest groups will endorse Monday require legislation to put into practice, a senior administration official noted. “This is really dependent on getting reform done,” the official said.

Now one might be thinking, why wouldn't insurance companies and health care providers have already tried to cut administrative costs? Doesn't that just make good business sense? Wouldn't the Invisible Hand of the Market and the self-sustaining miracle of free market capitalism naturally move in that direction? Well, perhaps. But these proposals are revolutionary, ground-breaking, brilliant.

The specific means the interest groups intend to employ were not explained Sunday. The administration did offer some examples, however, that closely match elements of what Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) is expected to include in his legislation, such as reducing insurance company paperwork, “bundling” a single payment to hospitals and other providers that collaborate on a treatment and adding Medicare payment incentives to encourage providers to coordinate the care they provide patients with chronic conditions.

Wow. Just wow. The first part is sort of like legislating that a server can't create separate checks. Get it? Instead of making the Insurance Company write individual checks to the hospital, the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the referring physician and so on, the insco will send just ONE check - presumably to the hospital. Who will then have the added administrative burden of splitting that check up and paying each of the individual providers. Brilliant! No mention of how or when this will actually reduce the patients' financial burden of course - perhaps if the inscos save enough money, they will be kind enough to trickle some of it down.

The second example is even better: because it is more effective and cost efficient for providers to coordinate care (that is, coordination should provide better care at a lower price), the only way to get for-profit free-market health care providers to do so is by paying them additional government funded incentives to do so!

I'm sure the full proposal, once released, will be full of such gems. I wonder if the patients' bills will even be mentioned in any of them?

Anyway, we can all relax. We are on the path to a uniquely American health care solution, one written by the big money interests to encourage themselves to reduce operating expenses, while providing legislated financial "bonuses" to do so. Now that the Health Care system is fixed, we can move on to something more important.