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The Obama administration is set to announce Friday an ambitious health-care experiment that will make Maryland a test case for whether aggressive government regulation of medical prices can dramatically cut health spending.
Under the experiment, Maryland will cap hospital spending and set prices — and, if all goes as planned, cut $330 million in federal spending. The new plan, which has been under negotiation for more than a year, could leave Maryland looking more like Germany and Switzerland, which aggressively regulate prices, than its neighboring states. And it could serve as a model - or cautionary tale - for other states looking to follow in its footsteps.
“You can put Maryland in the company of Massachusetts and perhaps Vermont as the three states furthest out in trying to invent a new future for cost accountability in health care spending,” added Harvard University’s John McDonough. “Success creates a model that other states will want to look at emulating. And failure means it’s an option more likely to be crossed off the list.”
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3 comments:
Watch the fun begin... people who will have their surgery delayed or pushed out because the hospitals will be running out of money(with their firm budgets that the State says that's all they need)
Nothing can go wrong here! Time for a new hospital in Delmar De.
People need to understand what this means. PRMC and other MD hospitals do not want you as a customer (patient). Under this system they get paid whether you are admitted or not. Guess what: you won't be admitted. There has been no explanation for how abuses will be detected or avoided. This makes the Soviet experimentation with centralized economic decision making look positively capitalistic by comparison.
Anon 9:53 is spot on. If only if it were that easy.
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