Freeze Health Care Costs; And stop building unnecessary facilities.
Health care reform can't wait for the answers that normal political processes will yield. It will take two years or more before a compromise health care reform package is fashioned, enacted and implemented. But during that time, health care expenditures will not stand still; they will have risen yet another 20 percent, perhaps considerably more. Even worse, health care providers, anticipating a comprehensive cost-containment program, will view the next two years as an irresistible window of price-increasing opportunity. The costs of health care will grow by $200 billion to more than $1 trillion dollars. We can't grow the economy by drowning it in health care dollars.</br></br>Proposal (1): Put in place now a wage-price freeze for the health care industry. This structure - analogous to the Cost of Living Council, part of the Economic Stabilization Program of the early 1970s - would remain in force until replaced by the new mechanisms created by the comprehensive health care reform legislation Congress will enact. Among the benefits of such a freeze are:</br></br>Because tomorrow's permanent cost containment efforts will phase in at today's spending levels, we will enter the future at a lower expenditure base, reaping immense savings from then on.</br></br>Accordingly, health care cost increases won't subvert either the economic stimulus or the long-term growth package the administration will submit.</br></br>Health care interest groups will be far more likely to come to the bargaining table and play a constructive role in helping to develop the comprehensive reform program the nation so eagerly awaits. The desire to be rid of the freeze will do much to concentrate the mind.