Getting Doctors Involved With Controlling Health Care Costs

Bruce Bartlett has an idea to try to convince the doctors to join the discussion for how to control health care costs without dismantling Medicare:

Putting the doc-fix in play would at least get the attention of doctors and show that there are real world consequences to talking about Medicare the way Republicans routinely do. Thus a second reason for my proposal is to create an action-forcing event that might have virtuous consequences.

 

Threatening a debt default to get Medicare reforms, as Republicans are doing, is utterly moronic. But holding the doc-fix hostage to fundamental Medicare reform makes a lot of sense. For one thing, if the doctors really thought they were going to get screwed, they would have an enormous incentive to put alternative Medicare savings on the table and lobby hard to get them enacted. And whatever group is screwed by whatever the doctors propose, probably the hospitals, would have an equally strong incentive to come up with their own alternative spending cuts. Thus there is the possibility of a virtuous spiral in which everyone in the health care field is coming up with ideas for cutting spending.