medicare reform

With health care legislation now up for debate in both the House and the Senate, comprehensive health care reform is closer than ever, says Timothy McBride, Ph.D., health economist and associate dean of public health at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. McBride says that there is still much work to be done with health care reform and contentious issues remain. Among those are the public option, how the legislation will be financed, the generosity of the coverage, Medicare Advantage reforms and whether there will be mandates for employers to offer coverage. (Video available)

Eliminating the need to ascertain eligibility.Years of double-digit increases in health care costs are devastating business, federal, state and family budgets. While the United States pays more per capita for health care than any other industrialized country, 44 million people lack assured care. “Most people overlook the most affordable way to achieve universal coverage – putting all of us under the Medicare umbrella,” says Merton C. Bernstein, a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Coles Professor of Law Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. “That single-payer system would reduce non-benefit spending by doctors, hospitals, clinics, laboratories and health care insurers by about $300 billion a year, providing funds to insure everyone without additional outlays.”