PAYMENT: Wilensky on Medicare SGR, Part 2
April 16th, 2007
by
Jane Hiebert-White
|
Today economist Gail Wilensky responds to comments about the Medicare sustainable growth rate on her earlier Health Affairs Blog post. Here’s an excerpt:
“As a market-oriented economist, I have a lot of sympathy with trying to rely on markets, but that’s hard to do in a Medicare system that in some areas dominates the market. It’s also hard to do in health care generally, where 1) people are using someone else’s money because third party payment as a strategy makes sense at least for low probability-high cost events; 2) spending is very concentrated; and 3) many seniors don’t have sufficient income to pay for even the significant amounts of routine care they use. Nonetheless, some strategies are better at trying to mimic market incentives than others.”
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