On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 7:27 PM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: > 1) hospitals are going to pay for the uncollectable patient debts, so > they're going to deny treatment more (or raise the price, whatever's > easier) -- at a time when more and more patient debts are > uncollectable due to persistently high unemployment, low consumer > asset prices (401k, housing, etc.), and tighter consumer credit;
This is a neoclassical argument: "businesses will just pass on the costs to consumers or simply close the shop" if you raise their cost of doing business. Not necessarily. That depends on their profit margins among other things. For e.g., do you know how much of this uncollectable debt is incurred by hospitals just gaming the system because they know they will get it from the government? Frankly this is an intellectually lazy argument, I expect better from PEN-Lers. > 2) getting rid of "overpayments" is great in a perfect world (assuming > that they really are overpayments), but in the kind of situation that > we now face, this means that nursing homes will cut admissions (or > raise the price, whatever's easier) -- or possibly shut down;(Note > that the savings of the retired on not in very good shape these days.) Once again without details, how can you tell one way or another if the overpayments are real or not? > 3) in a period when state governments' finances are almost all > severely in deficit, cutting the federal share puts more weight on > them, so they'll cut services, raise fees, or even go into bankruptcy; I'll grant you this one. > 4) last and most obviously, cutting spending on "the training of > doctors" is cutting exactly the kind of "investment spending" that > Obama used to be in favor of. Why? Last I heard doctors are doing just fine. They can well afford to pay for their own training. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29bach.html Now think about all the 'cuts' that progressives should really be fearing that are *not* in this plan. Increasing Medicare eligibility ages. Means-testing. Medicaid block-grants. Etc. You still haven't showed why that headline that you quoted was profoundly misleading. -raghu. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
