Daschle's Ghost

Any of this look familiar?

Medicare should pay more for care that leads to good outcomes, and should stop paying for unnecessary or harmful treatments.

Americans who want to keep their employer-based insurance should be allowed to do so, but people should also be able to buy insurance from the pool that covers federal employees, or from a new pool based on a similar model.

All Americans should be required to buy health insurance

Create a Federal Health Board, modeled on the Federal Reserve Board that manages monetary policy. The basic idea is to create an institution, run by experts, that answers to the government

The U.S. “won’t be able to make a significant dent in health-care spending without getting into the nitty-gritty of which treatments are the most clinically valuable and cost effective.”

Tom Daschle, WSJ Blog, 11/20/08

And this from JAMA . . .

Medical care at the end of life consumes 10% to 12% of the total health care budget and 27% of the Medicare budget. Many people claim that increased use of hospice and advance directives and lower use of high-technology interventions for terminally ill patients will produce significant cost savings.

We now return you to your regular programming.