CBO: "Looks Like Medicare Needs a Death Panel"

Bruce Krasting, writing at the invaluable Zero Hedge, alerts us to the latest timely missive of the CBO's Douglas Elmendorff.

...[Congressional Budget Office chief Elmendorf] gave a speech this morning on Medicare. I think he gave us a window into what is coming. He outlined a number of measures that would help to put Medicare on firmer footing.

The federal government will spent north of $1 trillion in 2011 for health care (7% of total GDP!). Half of that will go to Medicare. That’s a bad result. But it is nothing compared to what will happen in the coming decade. The cost of all medical treatment will rise substantially above Mr. Bernanke’s measurement of inflation and there will be many more people on the Medicare line due to the rapidly aging population.

...Cut payments to Medicare providers for services they provide.

...Reverse the expansion of Medicaid and the subsidies for purchasing insurance that were enacted in last year’s legislation...

...The most significant recommendation (to me) is the suggestion that Medicare will not cover new treatments under some circumstances. This is the Death Panel concept of rationing health care that everyone has been taking about...

"Currently, Medicare pays the costs of nearly any medical treatment or procedure that a doctor recommends. An alternative would be for Medicare to pay only the cost of existing ways of dealing with a specific health problem..."

I was surprised that Elmendorf made it clear that if someone on Medicare had the money to pay for the better, newer treatments they could do it. But they had to shell out of their pocket. In this plan, what happens to those who don’t have that money? Easy, they die or get inferior treatment.

"Under such an approach, patients would be able to use their own money to pay for the more-expensive care, but the federal government would not pay more."

Elmendorf acknowledges the difficulty in making the choices of which treatments are covered and which are not:

"It would be an immense challenge to formally classify treatments and procedures into sets that address the same health problems and to evaluate whether some treatments and procedures are better for some or all patients."

Yes Doug, it will be an “immense challenge” to come up with that list. But that list is coming.

Oh, and dear moonbats liberals progressives media-types: you know what the guys who create "the list" are called?

A death panel, schmucks.