Bill Bennett: “I have enjoyed being here this morning and hearing the debate. When I came to the Senate, I was interested in health…”

“I have enjoyed being here this morning and hearing the debate. When I came to the Senate, I was interested in health care, anxious to do what I could to improve health care in this country, and recognized rather quickly that one of the major things that has happened in this country is that technology has long since outstripped, overcome, and ignored legislation. I tell town meetings, among people who talk to me about Medicare, Medicare is the best Blue Cross Blue Shield fee-for-service indemnity plan that we could devise in the 1960s, frozen in time. Legislation does not allow flexibility; legislation freezes things. And we have a Medicare system that, frankly, makes little or no sense in the face of the way we practice medicine today. In the 1960s, when Blue Cross Blue Shield laid down their fee-for-indemnity plan, which Congress basically embraced and froze in legislation, prescription drugs didn't make much of an impact. The big financial challenge in those days was the cost of going to the hospital. So a plan was frozen in place that said, We will reimburse you for going to the hospital and, today, 40 years later, the way Medicare is structured doesn't make any sense. People take pills rather than having an operation, but the pills, even though they are many times cheaper than the operation, are not reimbursed, whereas the operation would be. There is a disincentive to practice intelligent medicine under Medicare.”