We'd welcome your thoughts on President Barack Obama's speech to the AMA on Monday. Here are some excerpts of the speech (also click the word cloud on the right, the font size for words used in the speech increases for every time it was repeated):
That's why I'm open to expanding the role of a commission created by a Republican Congress called the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which happens to include a number of physicians on the commission. In recent years, this commission proposed roughly $200 billion in savings that never made it into law. These recommendations have now been incorporated into our broader reform agenda, but we need to fast-track their proposals, the commission's proposals, in the future so that we don't miss another opportunity to save billions of dollars, as we gain more information about what works and what doesn't work in our health care system.
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Now, I know that there's some concern about a public option. Even within this organization there's healthy debate about it. In particular, I understand that you're concerned that today's Medicare rates, which many of you already feel are too low, will be applied broadly in a way that means our cost savings are coming off your backs. And these are legitimate concerns, but they're ones, I believe, that can be overcome. As I stated earlier, the reforms we propose to reimbursement are to reward best practices, focus on patient care, not on the current piecework reimbursements. What we seek is more stability and a health care system that's on a sounder financial footing.
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Today, we're paying Medicare Advantage plans much more than we pay for traditional Medicare services. Now, this is a good deal for insurance companies. It's a subsidy to insurance companies. It's not a good deal for you. It's not a good deal for the American people. And by the way, it doesn't follow free market principles, for those who are always talking about free market principles. That's why we need to introduce competitive bidding into the Medicare Advantage program, a program under which private insurance companies are offering Medicare coverage. That alone will save $177 billion over the next decade, just that one step.