Medicare policy is conspicuously absent from the 2024 presidential election. Health policy scholar Paul Ginsburg believes it’s because both Democrats and Republicans understand that needed reforms to Medicare won’t catch on.
“Our policies are broken,” Ginsburg said in a conversation with First Opinion Editor-in-Chief Tory Bosch on this week’s podcast. “Our most important policy problems, perhaps the problems we need to solve the most, are not talked about for reasons that are unpleasant. So the public is really missing out.”
Bosch spoke to Ginsburg about his belief that single-payer health care would never work in the United States and the differences in the two parties’ approaches to health policy. Democrats support further regulation of existing markets, while Republicans tend to be skeptical of such regulation Regulation could work. Ginsburg also noted that in some cases, Congress is coming together on what she called bipartisan health care issues, such as what to do about pharmacy benefit managers.
Ms. Ginsburg is a senior fellow at the Schaefer Center for Health Policy and Economics at the University of Southern California. He is also a former vice chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. For more of his views on policy, read his essay in STAT, “How the next president should reform Medicare.”
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