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NewsFlash: October 20, 2006

Making Health Care Worse

In an effort to supposedly improve health care and contains its costs, the Bush administration is pushing such proposals as high-deductible health insurance plans, health savings accounts, and reduced Medicare program spending. But a paper by EPI economists Elise Gould and Max Sawicky shows how those proposals do little to nothing at all in improving access to adequate health insurance for the 46 million uninsured Americans.

In a posted  paper summary  that is part of a larger article in the September/October edition of Challenge magazine, Gould and Sawicky show how the president’s proposals would do a poor job of reducing wasteful expenditures and may end up exacerbating them. Moreover, the Bush plan would force consumers to make spending decisions that may cause them to forgo care that saves money in the long run. The paper also touches on attacks made to employer-sponsored group health insurance plans and the principal federal programs of Medicare and Medicaid – programs that more evenly and fairly spread risk and future health-care costs across American health consumers than do the Bush proposals. 

Click  here  for the paper summary. (Journalists seeking the whole Challenge magazine piece can contact M.E. Sharpe, Inc., at 1-800-541-6563.)