Subject: Re: The Affordability Tour Kicks Off
Well, sure, but another factor to consider is that price ceilings rarely work and instead lead to shortages of whatever good you're placing a cap on.

If the feds were to ever cap Medicare fees to high degrees you'll simply see more doctors and service providers...drop out of the program as they won't earn enough to cover *their* costs. As a result access to care for the people who need it most will get worse.

Well, the main counterexample to that would be....nearly every national health care system everywhere in the developed world. Virtually every Western developed country has a single-payer health system to cover all (or very nearly all) medical services, and they all have price lists for services. Results vary somewhat from country to country, but nearly all of them have a pretty well-functioning health care sector that keeps the population generally healthy without acute shortages. Some have made poor decisions in implementing their single-payer systems, of course - but we wouldn't look at the broad spectrum of results that include many countries without significant problems in providing medical care and conclude that having a price list inherently results in shortages.

With single-payer, the idea is that just like all the enrollees, all of the providers will have to get into the same pool as well. You won't have a situation where it's viable for too many doctors to drop out of the program, because all of their customers will be in the program.

But my point is that it's exceptionally unlikely that Congress would actually set the reimbursement rates in this new program low enough to either achieve much cost savings, or dissatisfy the medical providers. For the same reason why no one's writing articles about how mean and harsh Congress is to their defense contractors when setting budgets or issuing contracts for military services, you're not going to see too much in the way of sharpened pencils going after health care costs - especially once people stop paying actual premiums for health care and just have their annual year-end tax bill. Just like the "doc fix"....