Members of Congress are seriously considering proposals to rein in the growth of health spending by taking tens of billions of dollars of Medicare money away from doctors and hospitals in high-cost areas and using it to help cover the uninsured or treat patients in lower-cost regions.
Those proposals have alarmed lawmakers from higher-cost states like Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. But they have won tentative support among some lawmakers from Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon and Washington, who say their states have long been shortchanged by Medicare.
Nationally, according to the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, Medicare spent an average of $8,304 per beneficiary in 2006. Among states, New York was tops, at $9,564, and Hawaii was lowest, at $5,311.
Researchers at Dartmouth Medical School have also found wide variations within states and among cities. Medicare spent $16,351 per beneficiary in Miami in 2006, almost twice the average of $8,331 in San Francisco, they said.
Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s New York Times.
[blockquote]Members of Congress are seriously considering proposals to rein in the growth of health spending by taking tens of billions of dollars of Medicare money away from doctors and hospitals in high-cost areas and using it to help cover the uninsured or treat patients in lower-cost regions.[/blockquote]
What? Congress rationing and playing politics with healthcare coverage? Surely not! We’ve been assured socialized medicine would never ever ever come to that!
So is this what pragmatic and rational public policy looks like? Or is it more like Barney Frank leaning on GM to keep open a plant in his district?
I have an idea – why don’t we all get from the government the same coverage that members of Congress and their staff get as government employees?? Think that will ever happen??
Not in a million years!
Unless we get in our Congress’ faces about it, and demand it!
I’ll add this question: Why should Congress be allowed to have access to medical services that we ordinary [i]citizens[/i] can’t have? What makes them so privileged?