The most important op-ed on health care reform in the United States this week

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Or perhaps this month. It's very hard to find an article or op-ed that deal with the core of the issue of health care reform, but this one here from the Washington Post does. The reason why is that the issues being discussed over and over again in the media (public option, the idiotic death panel claim, etc.) are really a tiny, tiny part of the bill being proposed.

Actually, the interesting part of the op-ed is not the first few parts but rather the last section, which details what reform actually means - a lot of "wonky tweaks", or the countless tiny adjustments made here and there that eventually result in a bill hefty enough to be used as a weapon. According to the op-ed, pagef 75 to 110 of the Finance Committee's bill are about changes to the delivery system in order to increase efficiency, then there are a few pages about "value-based purchasing", then the "National Pilot Program on Payment Bundling". All these tiny and completely tame changes put together apparently will result in a total of $2 trillion in savings over 10 years. If that's the case then health care reform is guaranteed to have a certain amount of success regardless of what major changes are made, as long as the bill with all the wonky tweaks gets passed.

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