Senate Hearings Address Health Insurance, Care, and Medicare Woes
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Featuring testimony from former Health and Human Services secretaries Tommy Thompson and Donna Shalala, the committee is already struggling over what to do with a broken health care system, employer based health insurance, and the future of Medicare.
According to Kaiser's Daily Health Policy Report, Thompson suggests a primary focus on Medicare, specifically with goals of "changing Medicare by cutting benefits, increasing revenue and raising the age for eligibility."
This would be designed to counteract Medicare's growing costs - Medicare's hospital trust fund will begin paying out more than it is taking in by 2013 and it could be insolvent by 2019.
Shalala believes otherwise - she suggests that by streamlining the "political system" surrounding Medicare, positive changes could be made there as well as in hospital procedure, and by extension, in health insurance itself. She believes that the "private sector" will "follow Medicare" in an effort to minimize medical costs.
Both arguments have been heard before, each struggling to make both Medicare and health care more functional for all Americans. It's not clear how either plan would interact with the health insurance promises being made by Republican presidential nominee John McCain and Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
However, if American politics on both sides of the aisle could agree on how to make health care in America really work, something productive just might actually happen.