How the Medical Establishment Got the Treasury’s Keys
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/how-the-medical-establishment-got-the-treasurys-keys/
How the Medical Establishment Got the Treasurys Keys
Uwe E. Reinhardt
About half a century ago, organized medicine and the hospital industry in this country struck a deal with Congress that in retrospect seems as audacious as it seems incredible: Congress was asked to surrender to these industries the keys to the United States Treasury.
In return, the industries would allow Congress to pass a 1965 amendment to the Social Security Act, described as an act to provide a hospital insurance program for the aged under the Social Security Act with a supplementary health benefits program and an expanded program of medical assistance, to increase benefits under the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance System, to improve the Federal-State public assistance programs, and for other purposes. We have come to know it as Medicare.
As Wilbur Cohen, a chief architect of the law and subsequently secretary of health, education and welfare, later described the deal (Page 25):
The sponsors of Medicare, myself included, had to concede in 1965 that there would be no real controls over hospitals and physicians. I was required to promise before the final vote in the executive session of the House Ways and Means Committee that the federal agency [to be in charge of administering Medicare] would exercise no control.