Medicare Should, But Cannot, Consider Cost: Legal Impediments to a Sound Policy
58 Pages Posted: 9 Sep 2005
Abstract
Medicare must decide whether to pay for extremely expensive new medical advances. This article shows that Medicare does not have the legal power to consider cost when making these decisions, but does have a conflicting moral obligation to preserve scarce financial resources. Here, the legal, historical and political contexts that have led to this conflict are described and a proposal is made for fixing this by having Congress create independent boards to assess new technologies with an explicit mandate to consider cost.
Keywords: Medicare,ration, cost-benefit, coverage, cost-effective
JEL Classification: H51, K23, I11, K32, I00, K10
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation