Transcripts

"Commentary"-Oil vs. Healthcare

SUSIE GHARIB: Tonight's commentator says while oil prices are grabbing headlines, healthcare costs are the real worry for the U.S. economy. She's Alice Rivlin, senior fellow at Brookings and former vice chair at the Federal Reserve.

ALICE RIVLIN, SENIOR FELLOW, BROOKINGS: With attention focused on skyrocketing oil prices, rising health care costs have dropped from view. But health spending is soaring, fueled by an aging population, torrents of new drugs and medical techniques and failure to control wasteful, ineffective spending. Health care has more potential to wreck our economy than oil. If current trends persist, health care will consume 20 percent of total spending in less than a decade. If we don't find a way to slow its growth, health care will bust all our budgets -- Federal, state, corporate and personal alike. We can't do much to change the oil price, which reflects rising world demand pressing on a limited supply, but we can do more to get more health care for the dollars we spend. If Medicare, the country's largest payer, takes the lead, private payers will follow. Medicare should pay for best practices, not unnecessary tests and procedures, insist on electronic medical records, require competitive bids on medical equipment and stop paying extra for the Medicare advantage program. Private payers should also move aggressively to improve efficiency. The argument that we can't control costs until we cover the uninsured is nonsense. We will never get universal coverage until we slow the growth of total spending and we had better start now. I'm Alice Rivlin.