Summary
"You're not going to get cost containment unless you're willing either to put a restriction on tax deductibility or impose serious regulation. So it seems to me we're going to continue to move toward efficiency piecemeal."
—Len Nichols, Office of Management and Budget
"The decline in Medicare trust funds is so significant, so rapid at the end, that at most, through provider and reimbursement cuts, the date of insolvency can be pushed back maybe a year. That's the big issue. It's something that employers should be very concerned about."
—Larry Atkins, The Corporate Health Care Coalition
"The kind of system we want, if we believe in competition and enterprise, is one where the market encourages insurers, hospitals, and physicians to innovate—to come up with better ways to take care of the people who are costing us a lot of money. By 'us,' I mean employers or whoever is paying the bill."
—Stan Jones, Consultant
"One of our fundamental problems is there's an insurance market and a health care market. If there were one market, we would realign the incentives, which would allow us to better address the issue of cost."
—Dan Leach, Lutheran Medical Center
"The question seems to be about whether we intended, when we went down this road to an employment-based system, to have employees, or even the employers, in small firms pay a higher price for a comparable product."
—David Helms, The Alpha Center
"While some employers want to reduce the number of HMOs offered to their employees, others view HMO competition as a key part of their benefits strategy."
—Bill Link, Prudential Insurance Company of America
"I think that the key thing for so many physicians is to be able to be part of a managed care plan that understands some of their problems with respect to the quality of care."
—Alan Nelson, M.D., American Society of Internal Medicine
"The decline or even elimination of employment-based health benefits implies neither that American health care will improve nor that American health care will deteriorate. It does imply that American health care will be different."
—Denny Dennis, National Federation of Independent Business