Maggie's Farm

Do you really believe that such a complex regulatory web will reduce costs? A quick look-see gives the impression that an inordinately large amount of money will be going just to maintain that regulatory web.

One reason for the high cost of American medical compared to the rest of the world is that we lead the world in medical innovations. Our pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment companies make their profits in the US- seventeen years until patents expire- and the rest of the world gets the results much more cheaply.Reduce the revenue stream for medical innovations, and medical innovations will be considerably reduced.

If the Obama administration had been SO concerned about reducing medical costs, it would have done something about tort reform. It did not do so, because tort lawyers are big contributors to the Democratic Party. Read what Dr. Howard Dean said. Dean was formerly Governor of Vermont and Chairman of the Democratic Party National Committee.
Asked by an audience member why the legislation does nothing to cap medical malpractice class-action lawsuits against doctors and medical institutions (aka "Tort reform"), Dean responded by saying: “The reason tort reform is not in the [health care] bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everybody else they were taking on. And that’s the plain and simple truth,”
Dean is a former physician, so he knows about skyrocketing medical malpractice insurance rates, and the role of the trial lawyers in fueling the "defensive medicine" approach among medical personnel who order too many tests and other sometimes unneeded procedures "just to be sure" and to protect themselves against litigation.

Estimates are that tests performed to legally cover the physician, as opposed to tests performed that the physician considers necessary, add ten percent to our medical costs.

There were some piecemeal things the Obama administration could have done to reduce costs. This brobdingnagian bill of two thousand plus pages will do nothing of the sort.