Health Reform: Lessons Learned During the First Year

Chairman Baucus, Ranking Member Hatch and Members of the committee, thank you for the privilege of appearing today.  In this written statement, I hope to make the following points.  One year after the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA):

• The health care reform remains a missed opportunity for Medicare reform.  Medicare is in deep financial distress that cannot by disguised by gimmicky trust fund accounting, will be unlikely to successfully absorb the planned provider cuts in the ACA, and lacks a real fix to the broken Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) mechanism;

• Medicaid will be deeply stressed by the ACA, as states lack the flexibility to balance the mandates and coverage expansions and beneficiaries continue to have difficulty in achieving access to providers; and

• It has become obvious that the ACA is not a route to more jobs in America.  Instead, its toxic mix of mandates, higher taxes, explosive spending, and deficits are a drag of the already-weak economic recovery.

Let me discuss these in turn.

For the full PDF of the testimony, click here.