With all the to-ing and fro-ing and he-said she-said, by both politicians and the media, about whether or how much health reform will "bend the curve" (and Len Nichols will post shortly on why he's fairly hopeful) it's worth going back to what Bob Reischauer told the Atlantic.com recently. Remember that Reischauer was head of CBO during the Clinton reform efforts in 1993-94 -- and his blunt skepticism about the cost of that plan played a role in the collapse of that health reform effort.
As Ron Brownstein wrote:
No one can say for certain that these initiatives will improve efficiency enough to slow the growth in health care spending. Some are only pilots; others would affect only a small portion of providers' revenue from Medicare. CBO typically evaluates them skeptically: it generally scores little or no savings from most of them. Former CBO director Robert Reischauer... says that's not surprising. "CBO is there to score savings for which we have a high degree of confidence that they will materialize," says Reischauer, now president of the Urban Institute. "There are many promising approaches [in these reform ideas] but you...can't deposit them in the bank." In the long run, Reischauer says, it's likely "that maybe half of them, or a third of them, will prove to be successful. But that would be very important."
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