Medicare is the federal health insurance program that covers most people age 65 or older and some young people who are disabled or have end-stage renal disease are also eligible. Medicaid is a federal government program designed to ensure that the poor and children and pregnant women living under poverty level receive quality health care.
Our second health care reform proposal is to strengthen these current government programs because we have good programs that just need to be built up, not completely torn down.
If policymakers want to improve access to needed health care services then significant changes to Medicare need to be made. As the ratio of retirees grows in relation to the working age population, it will be more difficult to fund medical care for seniors. Strengthening Medicare will require modifications in several areas. Some ideas to get the best value from our health care include placing a priority on preventative care and chronic care management and making health care delivery more efficient by developing clinical practice guidelines that promote service utilization. To improve health care decision making it will help to support funding for quality research that will improve health care value and design systems that provide applicable, timely and actionable information that will help physicians provide the best possible care. Patients should also have support and incentives. This can be accomplished by reforming beneficiary cost-sharing so that patients have a single premium and deductible for all Medicare services. Also, providing subsidies to help low income beneficiaries meet their cost sharing duties and looking into facilitating more efficient and meaningful approaches to cost-sharing will provide incentive to patients.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) oversees the program at the federal level, while the states deal with the day to day business. CMS and Congress should enhance oversight of the Medicaid program. Congress should consider requiring increased attention to fiscal accountability by requiring Health and Human Services to improve the demonstration review process.
Some people believe that the financing issue in our health care system is not as important as others because they consider quality to be the most important of the three legs in the three legged stool of health care; cost, quality and access. They argue that the type of care people receive is the main thing that should be in concern. This would allow people to receive better service and treatments. Although this is an important point, we disagree because nobody can even go in for care if they can’t afford it. People are denied service because they do not have insurance and people are living without any health care because they do not have the means to pay. If more people could afford care, the
Instead of bashing the current system we have now, we need to work on a plan that will fix it and make it more beneficial for more people. Strengthening the current government programs will help to make insurance and health care more affordable for Americans.
Bridget Morgan
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- Dawn, Ralph. Medical Eligibility/Coverage. Topic Collection: Medicare and Medicaid.
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- Strategies to Improve Medicare. American Medical Association. April 2008. http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/399/nac_strategies.pdf. Accessed March 10, 2010.
- Kanof, M. Medicaid Program.
I think it is interesting how you suggest that we have a good foundation to our system. It seems most Americans, including many conservatives feel the system is extremely broken. We have been incrementally trying to "fix" the system for the last 70 years. It seems like it is time for a sweeping change.
ReplyDeleteWhen you talk about improving health care decision making, you say that patients should have support and incentives. You use single premium and deductible payments for all medicare services as an example. I think that patient support and incentive should be stressed in the preventitive level of medicine first. People need to be educated in order to understand what these incentives mean. Lowering the cost of treatments doesn't necessarily imply that people will seek medical help at earlier stages of their ailments. Community members should be educated about their medical care system to assure that they utilize it properly.
ReplyDeleteI agree that we need to work on improving the system we have now instead of trying to start fresh - we all saw how difficult and drawn out that could get as with the recent health care reform. I do think that we can still incorporate quality in the reform however. As a CNA, I often see elderly patients placed in nursing homes when they do not require that extent of care. Some patients could do very well in an independent, assisted or at home care setting, but because medicare does not cover some of those options they opt for the sometimes more expensive nursing home because it is covered by medicare. Once in a nursing home, their conditions often worsen merely because of their environment leading to more expensive and extensive cares. This issue should also be considered as a preventative measure.
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