This may only be a minor victory, but to me it smells like a victory for the President and Peter Orszag.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... This article by Sam Stein (I'm beginning to really like that guy).
In a letter to the president that was made public on Tuesday, 13 academics and experts, including nine members of the CBO's own Panel of Health Advisers said that significant reductions in health care costs could be achieved by creating an independent council to moderate Medicare costs.
Peter Orszag's letter describing the group's endorsement below the fold:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/...
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Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Another Look at IMAC
Peter R. Orszag, Director
Yesterday, a group of some of the most distinguished health economists in the country sent a letter to the President and Congress in support of the Administration’s proposal for the establishment of an independent board of doctors and health experts to guide Medicare policy. This Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC) would make recommendations on Medicare reimbursement policy and other reforms – playing a critical role in allowing health care policy to adjust flexibly to a dynamic health care market, thereby helping contain costs and improve quality over time.
As the authors note, "a properly structured Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC), with a congressional mandate and authority to do so, can reduce the rate of growth of health expenditures substantially."
The signatories of this letter are household names to health policy wonks – Alan Garber, Jonathan Skinner, Joe Newhouse, and David Cutler to name just four – and they represent almost half of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisers. Their support of the IMAC proposal underscores what most serious health analysts have recognized for some time: that moving toward a health system emphasizing quality rather than quantity will require continual effort, and that a key objective of legislation should be to put in place structures (like the IMAC) that facilitate such change over time. And ultimately, without a structure in place to help contain health care costs over the long term as the health market evolves, nothing else we do in fiscal policy will matter much, because eventually rising health care costs will overwhelm the federal budget.
Again, Sam Stein (geez, did I mention that I love this guy?) over at Huffpost had this to say:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
"A properly structure Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC), with a congressional mandate and authority to do so, can reduce the rate of growth of health expenditures substantially," the author's wrote.
The letter, which went on to favorably cite the CBO, is nevertheless a rebuke of sorts for the office whose director, Douglas Elmendorf, wrote in late July that an independent panel to monitor Medicare spending would achieve little savings over a ten-year period.
Elmendorf's report spawned blaring, negative headlines for the administration, including one from Politico that read: "CBO deals new blow to health plan."
"The signatories of this letter are household names to health policy wonks... and they represent almost half of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Health Advisers," Orszag wrote on his blog Tuesday. "Their support of the IMAC proposal underscores what most serious health analysts have recognized for some time: that moving toward a health system emphasizing quality rather than quantity will require continual effort, and that a key objective of legislation should be to put in place structures (like the IMAC) that facilitate such change over time."
The authors note that the IMAC would be most effective if it included both physicians and non-physicians, had clear direction from the president and Congress, and operated "in a way that ensures that long-term benefits to the American people will not be sacrificed to short-term gains and narrow interests."