Word: califano
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...first showdown will be over the hospital cost containment bill. Carter introduced a similar bill in 1977, and while it passed the Senate last year, the hospitals applied enough local pressure to get it killed in the House Commerce Committee by one vote. This time the President, Califano and Administration aides are lobbying intensively, something they failed to do in 1978, calling the bill "the litmus test" of whether a legislator is really serious about fighting inflation. The bill, Carter insists, would save the country "some $53 billion" over the next five years the amount by which he estimates medical...
...against both points. Califano contends that hospitals braked their price increases only to counter the threat of Government controls, and predicts: "The day the Congress stops working on this problem, hospital rates will take off like a rocket headed for the moon." As for unfairness, Califano replies that, unlike other industries, hospitals operate in a "virtually noncompetitive system that says spend, spend, spend...
...Government into hospital affairs. The G.O.P. also sees the bill as a wedge to open the way for price controls in other industries. Contends Republican Congressman David Stockman of Michigan: "It is a classic Rube Goldberg legislative contraption that will be impossible to implement and virtually make Califano the hospital czar...
CARTER. The details are still being worked out by HEW, which has taken so long on the plan that a White House aide reports: "Carter is pissed off with Califano." Now expected to be made public later this year, the scheme would expand Medicare and Medicaid benefits for the aged and the poor. In addition, it would give those unprotected by company or public plans a chance of buying insurance at a "reasonable" cost, although that figure has not yet been determined. This insurance, subsidized by the Government, would provide a "core benefit package," including hospital and physician services...
...amount for, say, removal of a gallstone, rather than costs-plus. Says Dr. Mitchell Rabkin, director of Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. "I'd like to see a system of incentives?say, if we saved money, that money could be split between the insurer and the hospital." Califano and some state regulators also are launching a drive to require that a majority of the directors of any Blue Shield plan be laymen. At present, many Blue Shield plans are dominated by doctors, who, to put it delicately, have no great zeal to question fellow physicians' fees...