The special election victory of Scott Brown in the fight for the Massachusetts Senate seat left vacant by the late Ted Kennedy has all but ground the long-term discussion over massive healthcare reform in the United States to a complete halt. Brown’s victory gave Senate Republicans just enough heads to filibuster the passage of the House’s insurance plan, and the Senate plan already in place has been deemed unacceptable. So, in the meantime, President Obama is focusing on smaller measures that will hopefully improve the face of healthcare in America without the sweeping changes that have ignited so many partisan wildfires.
In the Obama administration’s budget proposal for the 2011 fiscal year, released today, the President supported measures to increase the use of cheap generic medications and boost the implementation of electronic records keeping. He also called for “limited steps” to lower out-of-pocket expenses for Medicare recipients. With Obama’s preferred reform hung up in Congress with no remedy in sight, he has turned his attention to smaller reforms aimed at making life marginally more comfortable for the millions of Americans plagued by expensive and/or insufficient amounts of health insurance.
One of Obama’s proposals is a “demonstration program” that would seek to reform the Medicare payments of the elderly and chronically ill, who pay the most in out-of-pocket costs that they can ill afford. The plan also allots millions of dollars to health information technology so that doctors can help choose the most effective way of treating patients, and so that medical errors can hopefully be reduced.
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