Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Money & Business

Capital Commerce

Another Way to Attack Rising Healthcare Costs

November 01, 2007 03:15 PM ET | James Pethokoukis | Permanent Link | Print

Arnold Kling of EconLog proposes one possible solution to rising healthcare costs:

If you're serious about cutting costs in government-funded health care programs, then you're serious about having government say "no" to a lot of procedures where now it says "yes." What that means is that "Medicare for all" does not mean Medicare-as-we-know-it for all. It means something else. Call it Medicare-Minus for all.... So I actually propose a Medical Guidelines Commission to obtain and analyze statistics on the impact of medical procedures and then present the results in terms that doctors and patients can understand. I think that in order to cut back on the use of procedures with high costs and low benefits, we need to give consumers the means, the motive, and the opportunity to make different decisions.

Tags: healthcare | Medicare

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About the Capital Commerce Blog

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James Pethokoukis is the money and politics blogger for U.S. News & World Report , where he writes the monthly Capital Commerce magazine column. Pethokoukis is also the assistant managing editor of the magazine's Money & Business section. He has written for many publications including the New York Times, the American, USA Today, Investor's Business Daily, and TCS Daily. Pethokoukis is also an official CNBC contributor and appears frequently on that network's Kudlow & Company, Power Lunch, and The Call shows. In addition, he has appeared numerous times on MSNBC, Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, CNN, and Nightly Business Report on PBS. A 1989 graduate of Northwestern University where he double majored in Soviet politics and American history and a 1991 graduate of the Medill School of Journalism, Pethokoukis is a 2002 Jeopardy! champion.

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