The New Media Journal | Experts: Healthcare Bills Do Nothing to Lower Costs

The New Media Journal | Experts: Healthcare Bills Do Nothing to Lower Costs: "One of the White House's biggest boasts about the healthcare legislation now moving through Congress is that it should reduce healthcare costs for both government and society.

Many prominent experts are skeptical, however, and some say that the Obama administration's wrong.

'There are no provisions to substantively control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care. So the overall effort will fail to qualify as reform,' Dr. Jeffrey Flier, the dean of the Harvard Medical School, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Nov. 18. 'In discussions with dozens of healthcare leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national healthcare spending rather than restrain it.'

Most Capitol Hill Democrats cheered last week when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Senate bill, which lawmakers will begin to debate next week, should reduce federal budget deficits by $130 billion over the next 10 years and perhaps more after 2020, even as its costs are put at $848 billion over a decade.

Embedded in the CBO's analysis were a lot of blinking yellow lights, however.

The CBO figured that deficits would drop by $136 billion from 2010 to 2014, as tax increases go into effect but major healthcare changes don't. However, once the policy changes start kicking in, beginning in 2014, the CBO estimated that the deficit would rise by about $6 billion over the next five years.

From 2020 to 2029, while the CBO said that healthcare savings should cause deficits to drop sharply, it also warned that any precise forecasts 'would not be meaningful because the uncertainties involved are simply too great.'

As a result, 'the honest answer is that nobody knows' whether meaningful savings are possible, said Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan budget watchdog group.

Many of the same uncertainties cloud the nearer-term picture. Analysts ask how anyone can calculate patients' medical needs in the future. Will the bulging, aging baby-boomer population create new strains on doctors and hospitals? What kind of medical advances could bring down costs — or increase them?

Those are just the health-related questions. Who'll be president beyond 2012? Which party will control Congress? How will the economy perform?

'The problem is that historically, Congress has not been able to keep its word on constraining costs,' said Amitabh Chandra, a professor of public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

None of these questions is stopping the Obama administration and its supporters from insisting that healthcare costs can be brought under control."