Conservative Principles Now

President Barack Obama has promised Americans on multiple occasions that his health care plan would not cut benefits for Medicare enrollees. For example, on August 11th Obama promised: “I just want to be clear, again: Seniors who are listening here, this does not affect your benefits. This is not money going to you to pay for your benefits; this is money that is subsidizing folks who don’t need it.”

We pointed out at the time that Obama’s statement is simply not true. Yesterday, Associated Press reported:

The head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, told senators Tuesday that seniors in Medicare’s managed care plans would see reduced benefits under a bill in the Finance Committee.

The bill would cut payments to the Medicare Advantage plans by more than $100 billion over 10 years.

Elmendorf said the changes would reduce the extra benefits that would be made available to beneficiaries.

Heritage fellow Bob Moffit details just what the benefits are, including:

• prescription drug coverage
• preventive-care services
• coor­dinated care for chronic conditions
• routine physical examinations
• additional hospitalization
• skilled nursing facility stays
• routine eye and hearing examinations
• glasses and hearing aids

Moffit continues:

Medicare Advantage has several features that are superior to previous private health plan experiments: an improvement in financing and a greater level of market penetration and stability than Medicare Plus Choice. Most important, it gives senior and disabled citizens new and different private health plan options, more affordable care, and broader and better benefits, including care management programs and prescrip­tion drug coverage.
…
While these Medicare Advantage features are substantial improvements over traditional Medi­care, the next stage of reform must also make the total program affordable, modernize its insurance arrangements, and improve the delivery of medical services.
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For future generations to be able to afford Medi­care, the program will have to be restructured and reformed. For that reform to be successful, Con­gress will have to reform the existing payment sys­tem and provide a fixed-contribution system of premium support, properly adjusted, for each ben­eficiary.

Car insurance doesn’t pay to fill up your gas tank, why does health insurance pay for your flu shot? ABC’s John Stossel explores how third-party payments are driving up are nation’s health care costs:

Obamacare would only make the status quo worse. Heritage scholars Bob Moffit and Nina Owcharenko explained how when Obama first unveiled his plan last year:

The current structure of third-party payments—which Senator Obama wants to pre­serve—creates serious problems in the delivery of care. In this system, insurers and medical profes­sionals have little direct accountability to individu­als, either as consumers of insurance or as patients. The existing financial and insurance arrangements compromise both the interests of consumers who demand health insurance that meets their individual needs and the interests of patients who demand the best and highest value of medical services. Insurance may encourage either too much or too little of cer­tain types of care. As many prominent economists have suggested, the best policy response to that problem is to restructure the market to align the incentives of insurers, doctors, hospitals, and patients to ensure the delivery of value to patients.

The better policy approach is consumer driven health care. Heritage scholar Ed Haislmaier detailed six key principles of reform that will bring sanity to our nation’s health care system:

1. Individuals are the key decision makers in the health care system. This would be a major departure from conventional third-party pay­ment arrangements that dominate today’s health care financing in both the public and the private sectors. In a normal market based on personal choice and free-market competition, consumers drive the system.
2. Individuals buy and own their own health insurance coverage. In a normal market, when individuals exchange money for a good or service, they acquire a property right in that good or ser­vice, but in today’s system, individuals and families rarely have property rights in their health insur­ance coverage. The policy is owned and controlled by a third party, either their employers or govern­ment officials. In a reformed system, individuals would own their health insurance, just as they own virtually every other type of insurance in virtually every other sector of the economy.
3. Individuals choose their own health insur­ance coverage. Individuals, not employers or government officials, would choose the health care coverage and level of coverage that they think best. In a normal market, the primacy of consumer choice is the rule, not the exception.
4. Individuals have a wide range of coverage choices. Suppliers of medical goods and ser­vices, including health plans, could freely enter and exit the health care market.
5. Prices are transparent. As in a normal market, individuals as consumers would actually know the prices of the health insurance plan or the medical goods and services that they are buying. This would help them to compare the value that they receive for their money.
6. Individuals have the periodic opportunity to change health coverage. In a consumer-driven health insurance market, individuals would have the ability to pick a new health plan on predict­able terms. They would not be locked into past decisions and deprived of the opportunity to make future choices.