Böcker av Henry Aaron

Everyone agrees on the need to reform Medicare but not on how to do it. Some argue the program is too comprehensive, others that it is not comprehensive enough.

The Great Society and the War on Poverty programs of the 1960s were undergirded by a broad consensus about the problems the US faced and how they could be solved. But by the early '70s both political and scholarly tides had shifted. In this book, Henry Aaron describes both the initial consensus and its subsequent decline.

In The Problem That Won''t Go Away, economists, political scientists, sociologists, public opinion experts, and government staff recount the history of the Clinton health plan, present several alternative strategies the administration might have pursued, and conclude that none was likely to achieve the administration''s goals of universal coverage and cost containment. Many support the view that the administration, Congress, and the nation lacked the political consensus and the information to credibly describe the effects of any single bill to reform the U.S. health care system. In that case, was the only option available to the administration to reach for goals far more modest than those it sought? Health care financing as a national political issue will not go away. Pressure to cut public spending to balance the budget means that medicare and medicaid will stay in the legislative spotlight; the retirement of the baby-boom generation in the beginning of the next century promises large increases in the cost of medicare; and a flood of new and costly medical technologies will continue to put financial pressure on everyone responsible for paying for health insurance. But, as this book illustrates, the nature of the debate in the years after the demise of the Clinton plan will be altogether different from that of the past several decades.

In the US he goals of controlling spiraling health care costs and extending insurance coverage or even maintaining current insurance coverage seem to be in conflict. But progress can be made on both goals if they are tacked together. Henry Aaron evaluates these critical issues and explores how adequate care can be provided without fueling inflation.

Over the past four decades, the share of income devoted to health care nearly tripled. If policy is unchanged, this trend is likely to continue. Should Americans decide to rein in the growth of health care spending, they will be forced to consider whether to ration care for the well-insured, a prospect that is odious and unthinkable to many.