President Obama, the analogy to Medicare hurts your case

From Grace Marie-Turner and Joseph Antos in the WSJ...

Pay special attention to 4, 7, 8, and 9 below...

President Barack Obama told a New Hampshire town-hall meeting last month that "if we're able to get something right like Medicare, then there should be a little more confidence that maybe the government can have a role." Did the government really get Medicare right? Here are the top 10 reasons this program should not be a model for reform, and why it would be dangerous for the federal government to be put in charge of any more of our health sector:

1) Medicare is going bankrupt.

2) Private payers are bailing out Medicare.

4) Low administrative costs are a mirage. The claim that Medicare's administrative costs are only 3% is fantasy. If all Medicare costs—such as revenue collection, personnel and enforcement—were accounted for, its administrative expenses would be at least twice as high. And it still wouldn't be providing services private insurers do, such as nurse hotlines, decision-support tools and fraud detection, or paying the income, property and provider taxes that private plans must pay.

5) Medicare is rife with fraud. According to the FBI, between 3% and 10% of all health spending is lost to health-care fraud....

6) Medicare short­-changes seniors.

7) Medicare's model is obsolete. Its basic benefit structure uses a fee-for-service model designed in 1965 which has not been altered since, except to add prescription drug coverage almost 40 years later. In contrast, private plans are continually evolving. They create incentives for patients to become more informed about their health choices, and offer innovative programs for disease management, wellness and prevention, and care coordination to improve quality and save money.

8) Payments are too low. Washington decides how much doctors, hospitals and other providers will be paid down to the smallest detail, with mountains of regulation and paperwork to track the politically driven process. Medical professionals are in a perpetual battle with Congress over their payment rates, and many physicians refuse to accept new Medicare patients because payment rates are so low. With few exceptions, Medicare's solution to cost containment is the club of price-controls, not innovation and efficiency.

9) Medical decisions are made in Washington. Patients and their doctors are slowly losing the ability to decide what course of treatment is best. Medicare's decisions to cut funding for the cancer drug EPO, implantable cardiac defibrillators and virtual colonoscopies, for example, have led to epic battles between providers and politicians, while patients and their doctors watch from the sidelines....