Of the House Ways and Means Committee that the federal agency would exercise no control. I was required to promise before the final vote in the executive session The sponsors of Medicare, myself included, had to concede in 1965 that there would be no real controls over hospitals and physicians. Social Security Act, described as “an act to provide a hospital insurance program for the aged under the Social Security Act with a supplementary health benefits program and an expanded program of medicalĪssistance, to increase benefits under the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance System, to improve the Federal-State public assistance programs, and for other purposes.” We have come to know itĪs Wilbur Cohen, a chief architect of the law and subsequently secretary of health, education and welfare, Perspectives from expert contributors.In return, the industries would allow Congress to pass a 1965 amendment to the Have to ask themselves at what price they can afford to buy additional life years for people insured with those collectively financed funds, which are, after all, finite. I responded that the issue is not the monetary value we put on our own lives with our own money, but rather that those who preside over private and public health insurance funds, Congress included, at some point You get to be 90 years old and you need a hip replacement, do you just let them fall and break the hip and die of pneumonia? Or do they get the opportunity, if they value that, to get that hip replaced? Reinhardt, do you believe that we, as individuals, in America should have the ability to value our own lives, or is this something we should ask the government to do for us, i.e., ration that care when I had called the idea that human life is priceless both romantic and silly.ĭr. and Republican of Georgia, took me behind the woodshed over a remark I had made in a post on this blog. Perspectives from expert contributors.At that hearing, Representative Phil Gingrey, M.D.
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