NEWS UPDATE 11/18/2010: LOOKING AHEAD?

A combination of commission reports and announcements from individual senators this week points to efforts to think beyond the current provisions of the Affordable Care Act, although with varying motivations.

On the surface, the release of draft recommendations from the co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, set up by President Obama earlier this year, would seem to be the most likely to lead to change. The Commission’s charge is a challenging one: “to identify policies to improve the [nation’s] fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run.” It’s also one that inevitably includes some emphasis on health care expenditures, especially Medicare and Medicaid.

With the Commission’s final report due on December 1, the co-chairs’ draft might be expected to be both detailed and politically realistic. However, the almost universally negative reaction to the draft from Commission members, politicians, and interest groups, suggests that neither is the case and that the likelihood of a final set of recommendations gaining majority approval is very slim indeed.

For Medicare and Medicaid the co-chairs’ draft might be summarized as “everyone pays a little more, everyone gets a little less.” Medicare and Medicaid cost-sharing would be increased, fraud would be reduced (as usual), adopt tort reform (as usual), expand successful cost containment demonstrations (if there are any), and cap Medicaid long-term care payments (that should improve nursing home conditions), etc, etc.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the DC swamp, a second commission just released its deficit reduction recommendations. This “unofficial” commission, created by the Bipartisan Policy Center and co-chaired by former Senator Pete Dominici and Alice Rivlin (also, oddly enough, a member of the President’s National Commission) produced much more aggressive recommendations for health care than the “trimming the undergrowth” approach of their cross-town rival.

The BPC commission’s proposals include phasing out the tax exclusion for employer health benefits, hiking Medicare premiums, and gradually moving Medicare to a partial voucher program, and imposing big taxes on sweetened drinks. It’s a package that, were it to be implemented, stands a much better chance of bending the health care cost curve. Implementation, however, seems as unlikely as for the “official” commission co-chairs’ draft, with liberals and conservatives alike already raining objections on the recommendations.

Meanwhile, individual senators are tossing out ideas.

Very-vulnerable-to-defeat-in-2012 Senator Ben Nelson, actually isn’t so much tossing out ideas as soliciting them. He’s desperate to find an alternative to the ACA individual mandate (not a big winner in the Senator’s home state of Nebraska) and has asked the GAO to come up with suggestions. Stay tuned…

One proposal that stands a better chance has come from Senators Ron Wyden (D) and Scott Brown (R). They want to move up to 2014 the possibility of states’ being granted ACA waivers. This is something that vulnerable senators like Ben Nelson (and maybe Scott Brown, too, by 2012) could find very appealing: potentially it offers states the opportunity to try to achieve what reform was intended to do, but without the unpopular ACA. The downside is that passage of the proposal could result in having fifty health care systems with different rules (not to mention the effects of the uncertain future in every state); the upside is that there might be one among them that is effective.

Or maybe, all these ideas will die an early death…