State official criticizes Obama’s plan to reform U.S. health-care system
By: Health Insurance
Submitted: 2009-11-13 16:23:58 | Word Count: 535
Louisiana and the nation face problems that won’t be solved by the health-care bill now in Congress, said state Secretary of Health and Hospitals Alan Levine on Tuesday.
Levine was in town to speak at the monthly meeting of the Thibodaux Rotary Club, held at Envie Restaurant.
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Levine said national health-care costs are too high and coverage needs to be expanded. But these problems are not addressed in the bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives Saturday, he said.
“When you read this 2,000-page bill, it goes so far beyond that you forget what you’re trying to solve,” Levine said. “This idea that the public option is the solution is just wrong.”
Levine said more people need access to health care, but government involvement in health insurance is not the answer. The Congressional Budget Office indicates that the federal government spends about $60 billion per year in waste, fraud and abuse, he said.
“That’s the government trying to run a health-care system,” he said. “It doesn’t work.”
If the government focused on reducing costs rather than providing everyone health-care, Levine said, enough money could be saved to pay for universal coverage.
“If you can address these inefficiencies and correct that, there’s enough money to provide for an expansion of coverage,” Levine said. “We can improve our health-delivery systems with private-sector principles.”
Levine mentioned the push to increase child immunization in Louisiana, which was supported by businesses across the state. This led the state’s immunization rate to jump from among the lowest in the nation to second.
Yet Louisiana faces other problems, Levine said, including unintended consequences of federal storm-recovery dollars. The money pumped into the state since hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 haw effectively increased the income of Louisiana residents. And that income is used to calculate how Medicaid costs are split between federal and state government.
As a result, the state’s share will nearly double in the next year, increasing costs from about $480 million per year to around $900 million per year.
Though Louisiana stands to lose a lot of federal health-care dollars because of those effects, it is not the only state facing sharp decreases in federal money.
Rotarian Barry Landry, a Thibodaux surgeon, asked why state leaders weren’t fighting against these changes.
Levine said state leaders may be worried that voicing opposition to federal health-care plans could lead federal administrators to further decrease support to those states.
Levine said he thinks health-care decisions are better handled by community-level health systems focused on the doctor and the patient.
“We sitting in an ivory tower in Baton Rouge cannot decide what is best for John Smith here in Lafourche Parish,” Levine said. “I believe in empowering consumers to make choices about what kind of health care they want.”
