Former President Jimmy Carter entered hospice care at his home in Plains Georgia last week. Hospice care is a form of palliative care for Medicare beneficiaries who are terminally ill with less than six months to live. People on hospice care agree to forgo all further treatments and are made as comfortable as possible until their deaths.
Why Are Hospitals Hurting Financially?
You would think with Covid driving so many people to the emergency rooms, hospitals would be in great financial shape. Yet in 2022 hospitals experienced the worst financial performance in memory. Jeff Goldsmith writes:
The Future Looks Bleak
To ensure that the federal government’s borrowing capacity does not become exhausted within the next 25 to 50 years, the growth in federal health care spending must be reduced relative to baseline spending. I provide two scenarios that would provide additional borrowing capacity. These would require federal spending on Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and the insurance subsidies to be reduced by at least 7.5 percent of baseline spending, or 0.5 percent of the economy, over the 2025 to 2034 budget window.
Beginning structural reforms sooner rather than later will allow a path of continuous growth in the budget for health programs while avoiding much larger, drastic cuts in the future as well as problematic future tax increases, inflation, and higher interest rates.
Friday Links
- What Jimmy Carter got right: deregulation that saved consumers hundreds of billions of dollars.
- More than $200 Million in New York City-Purchased COVID Gear Auctioned Off For Just $500,000. Thousands of ventilators de Blasio commissioned for $12 million sell as scrap metal for less than $25K.
- The White House favors an “AI Bill of Rights.” Rights for the robot? No. Rights for people who want to opt out of interacting with the robot.
- Study: Vaccine mandates did nothing to stop Covid spread.
- Health Affairs: Abortions are “health care.”