Ms. Verma called to question the role government should play in healthcare, outlining two paths she sees to reform: expansion of the government’s footprint in healthcare or limiting its reach.
The first path, which Ms. Verma says entails proposals like Medicare for All and a public option, would make the government’s role in healthcare “virtually absolute, omnipotent and unlimited.” Ms. Verma specifically criticized proposals from Democrats for a public option, which she likened to letting “referees play in the game they oversee.”
“Government should not be permitted to actively compete against the market it regulates. With a bottomless pocketbook, it would be a competitor that couldn’t lose. And that’s what makes the public option so insidious. Cleverly framed as the preservation of a free market, it would in fact devastate it,” she argued.
A public option, which involves adding a government-sponsored health insurance option into the marketplace to compete with private plans, has been backed by more than half of Democratic presidential candidates. In a recent study conducted by the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based liberal think tank, researchers found a public option alone could reduce federal health spending by $19.4 billion next year.
Rather than more government control, Ms. Verma vied for a system with more incentives for private players to move toward value-based care.
“We must realign the payment paradigm in government programs to create incentives that deliver the outcomes we want: prevention of disease, higher quality of life, and lower cost,” she said. “That’s why we have continued bipartisan efforts to realign incentives to develop over a dozen new innovative payment models that allow reimbursement to be tied to value, rather than merely volume of services.”
Read the full speech here.
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