Two budget experts who are part of The Concord Coalition’s Fiscal Solutions Tour emphasize the importance of Medicare reform in separate blog postings on The American Square.
Joe Antos of the American Enterprise Institute criticizes elected officials who downplay Medicare’s impact on the federal budget and want to keep it off-limits in talks over raising the debt limit. Medicare, he notes, “has long outpaced economic growth, absorbing increasing shares of the budget with no end in sight.”
Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution says the critical point is that the health system must be made more efficient: “Almost everyone agrees that we are getting poor value for our health dollar. Medicare’s open-ended fee-for-service system does not solve the problem; it exacerbates it.”
External links:
Antos: There’s No Limit on Irresponsibility
Sawhill: Ryancare
