Politics

Nation?s Leading Economists Urge Congress To Pass Health Insurance Reform

By Karina

In a letter sent this morning to President Obama and Congress, 41 of the nation?s leading economists ? including three winners of the Nobel Prize ? urge the swift passage of comprehensive health reform before Congress to slow ‘unsustainable’ health care spending:

?Without effective reform of the way we pay for health care, growth of health care spending will create unsustainable fiscal burdens, eat into cash compensation, perpetuate waste, and undermine the prospects for universal access to needed care.

The health care reforms passed by the House and Senate ? with recent modifications proposed by President Obama ? include serious measures that will slow the growth of health care spending?

Taken together, these measures are a serious, multi-faceted initiative to improve the quality and efficiency of American medical care, rein in the fastest growing portion of government and private budgets and provide a valuable platform for future cost-control efforts. If this nation is committed to cost containment and deficit reduction we must pass health care reform. If this legislation fails, the chances of reducing the growth of health care spending in the future will be greatly reduced.

Read the full letter»

Authors:

Henry J. Aaron
Bruce and Virginia MacLaury Senior Fellow, the Brookings Institution

David Cutler
Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics, Harvard University

Alice M. Rivlin
Senior Fellow, Economic Studies Director, Greater Washington Research, the Brookings Institution

Signatories: (more…)

Full post as published by The Gavel on March 11, 2010 (boomark / email).