Word: careful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...mandatory controls fail? Carter is trying to hold off the flood of inflationary growth without addressing the source; his approach is entirely superficial. The health care industry obeys the peculiar laws of nearly insatiable demand controlled by doctors and rising prices set by medical suppliers insensitive to hospital administrators because they knew he can pass the cost on to the insurer...
Ironically, in the ensuing decade-and-a-half, public insurance programs greatly exacerbated the upward spiral of health costs. By providing almost limitless funds for hospital services, Medicare and Medicaid fostered loose management, easy expansion and profits for related industries. Improvements in quality or access to care have generally been made at great cost. Hospitals compete for physicians with expensive new technology and abundant beds, and doctors stock the wards. Because insurance usually covers in hospital care, doctors tend to hospitalize a patient for procedures which could be done on an outpatient basis, to keep the patient in the hospital...
...increasingly take on difference in costs passed on in taxes and higher-priced non-medical goods. For example, a Ford car in 1968 cost about $20 more because of employee health insurance. Last year, the car would have cost $150 more for those benefits. The relative invisibility of health care costs insulates the health industry from public pressures which might force it to operate more efficiently and responsively, and leaves the public only partially aware of the real cost of the medical establishment...
AMERICANS TEND TO THINK health care is too important to be politicized. On the contrary, the health industry is now so large that it must be made accountable to the public interest. Direct regulation of hospitals, an industry already heavily over-capitalized, will not greatly improve efficiency. The passage of Carter's hospital cost containment bill will provide temporary relief to the federal budget and insurers, but in the long run will discourage more ambitious and fundamental changes. The debate between legislators and private interests must broaden to include public voices...
More specifically, Brown ripped into "the medical-industrial complex" and the high costs of health care. "The hospital today is the equivalent of the cathedral of the Middle Ages," he charged. "There is a high priesthood; there are mandatory offerings." As hospitals and doctors enjoy more money, he said, "we get more surplus hospital beds, more surplus technology, and we create a medical arms race." Brown contended that the U.S. armed forces "have the highest tail-to-teeth ratio [support-to-combat troops] in the world. Cuts are possible; I say less tail and more teeth." He advocated some form...