Published March 14, 2013 by Geert De Lombaerde, NashvillePost.com
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of posts from the Nashville Health Care Council’s Leadership Health Care Delegation to Washington. Look for more information from the trip in the coming days.
The prospects for reforming entitlement programs led the conversation during the first day of sessions in the Nashville Health Care Council’s Leadership Health Care 11th annual delegation to Washington, D.C. Health care policy and political experts spoke to 80 delegates from Nashville and across the country about the budgetary dynamics that are creating pressure for long-term entitlement reform and what, if any, changes we might expect in the coming years.
“There’s no way you can look at the long-term fiscal health of the country and think you can avoid taking on entitlements,” said Gail Wilensky, economist and senior fellow with Project Hope and the former administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration.
Wilensky, pictured above, said the country spent 5.6 percent of GDP on entitlement programs last year, which is nearly three times what we were spending in 1985, and projections show that by about 2030 or 2035 entitlement program spending will grow to between 9.5 percent and 10.5 percent of GDP on Medicare and Medicaid alone. When you add in Social Security, entitlement programs will account for about 17 percent of the U.S. economy.
The main challenge of entitlement reform, Wilensky said, is Medicare. She and members of a later panel discussion about entitlement reform agreed that any reforms to Medicare will need to do more than simply reduce reimbursements to health care providers. Reforms will need to include changes that affect the actual Medicare beneficiary, such as increasing the eligibility age from 65 to 67.
“It’s pretty straightforward” why entitlement programs have not had any meaningful reform to date while other programs have seen obvious funding reductions, said Joseph Antos, the Wilson H. Taylor Scholar in Health Care and Retirement Policy with the American Enterprise Institute. “Other programs tend not to provide direct income support to individual voters.”
In the near term, cuts will probably continue to be more “hidden” within reduced payments to providers, said Stuart Butler, Distinguished Fellow and director of the Center for Policy Innovation at the Heritage Foundation. “But the fact is, that does have an effect, and over the long haul it will start to hollow out those programs,” Butler said. “And that may be the only way you can do it, rather than an explicit decision to make fundamental change to the program.”
Some of the larger, more fundamental changes that should perhaps be on the table, according to the panelists, include income-related premiums for Medicare, restructuring Medicare cost sharing, repositioning Medicare as more of a “true insurance program” where individuals with the highest incomes pay the full cost of premiums and individuals only get a benefit when something goes wrong.
In a separate presentation on the state of affairs in Washington, Michael Ramlet, principal of public affairs firm Purple Strategies, said a lot of the discussions about changes to Medicare are purely hypothetical.
“I don’t think there will be any major moves in the Medicare environment; it’s not a place right now where there’s a lot of compromise.”
Ramlet explained that discussions in Washington are instead focused on issues such as the nuts and bolts of how to run insurance exchanges – the number of individuals who will be enrolled, the levels at which they will participate in exchanges, how much premiums will cost, how to make the “Herculean lift” of allowing multiple federal agencies share the data necessary to make exchanges work.
“This is where 2014 will be really interesting,” he said. “We’re trying to do a big technical lift, where at the same time you know insurance plans are changing a lot, and no one really knows what’s going to happen.”
