But he said the administration's announcement sends a clear signal that the health-care system is quickly moving away from this wasteful payment scheme.
Mr. Obama said last week that he would "reduce wasteful subsidies and erroneous payments," cut spending on prescription drugs and take other steps to save $500 billion in Medicare and Medicaid by 2023.
It would also mean another year of direct payments, a staggeringly wasteful kind of subsidy given to producers of corn (maize), cotton, rice, peanuts and so on regardless of whether they plant anything.
Moreover, Medicare made at least $48 billion in fraudulent provider payments in 2010 alone — wasteful and harmful spending that ironically serves to "lower" Medicare's relative administrative ratio.
For example, we eliminate fee-for-service as the foundation for health-care payments because it rewards costly, wasteful and repetitive services that benefit providers and drug manufacturers over patients.
Last year, a Washington Post investigation of farm subsidies found more than $15 billion in wasteful or redundant spending in other farm payments, including $1.3 billion to people who do not farm and $817 million to farms that use loopholes to exceed limits.
The left blames everything on gargantuan debt payments.In this section Bloated, wasteful, rigid and unfair What really happened in Venezuela?
It's the result of unconstitutional government efforts to subsidize with transfer payments and tax breaks a lot of wasteful spending.
From the staff perspective, user fees were a necessary evil as non-payment would in the first instance promote wasteful utilisation of health services and eventually lead to the collapse of the system, given the current low levels of government funding reaching them.
A celebrated study by the Rand Corp. showed that out-of-pocket payments deter needed health consumption as much as wasteful consumption, confirming the point that ordinary people aren't going to become savvy health shoppers.
