Medicare is fundamentally changing because of a change in perspective. John Goodman explained the reorientation of the program in a recent articles in Forbes.
The Trump administration is making fundamental changes to the Medicare program. The vision behind these reforms can be found in Reforming America’s Healthcare System Through Choice and Competition. This 124-page document from the Department of Health and Human Services challenges a premise behind 50 years of thinking in health policy circles: the idea that our most serious problems in health care arise because of flaws in the private sector. Most problems arise because of government failure, not market failure, the document declares, and it goes into great detail on how to correct the policy errors.
Trump policy toward health care is based on the idea of promoting choice, competition and market prices. In Medicare, so far, that means liberating telemedicine, liberating Accountable Care Organizations, ending payment incentives that are driving doctors to become hospital employees, promoting hospital price transparency, deregulating paperwork and creating more transparency in the market for prescription drugs.
Larry Wedekind and I described these changes in our article in Health Affairs and two follow up pieces in Forbes.
John
How the Trump Administration is Reforming Medicare at the Health Affairs Blog.
Trump’s Radial Reform of Medicare, Part I
Trump’s Radial Reform of Medicare, Part II