Kent Conrad wants to revisit health-care reform:
Unshackled by the need to get reelected, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) suggested Thursday that Democrats reopen the bitter healthcare debate, arguing that the reform law's provisions could yield opportunities to cut the federal deficit. [...]
“The healthcare accounts, we're spending one of every six dollars in this economy on healthcare. We're heading to one of every three,” Conrad said. “There have to be further reform and savings in the healthcare accounts.”
Conrad said he “personally” liked the idea of empowering the secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate prescription drug prices on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries.
This sounds like an opportunity for liberals. Already, the Affordable Care Act reduces Medicare spending by $500 billion over 10 years. To borrow a point from Jonathan Zasloff, the public option is a formerly discarded health-care program that could bring billions in savings to the federal government. According to an analysis from the Berkley Center on Health, Economic & Family Security, a public option that used Medicare reimbursement rates would reduce federal spending by $47 billion a year once fully implemented. Over 10 years, total federal savings would come to nearly $400 billion, or more than a third of the projected savings in President Obama's budget.
Indeed, if deficit reduction became the top priority for lawmakers, then liberals would do well to advocate for a whole host of health-care reforms, like a push to reduce the employer tax exclusion for health-care benefits, which would save hundreds of billions of dollars, or trillions if eliminated in full (in 2008, the McCain campaign estimated federal savings of $3.6 trillion over a decade).
This is all to repeat a point: Health-care spending is the chief driver of long-term debt, and if that's fixed, then we've basically solved the problem.
