Dr. Mark McClellan recently announced his intention to resign from the position of administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Finding a replacement shouldn’t be hard. The job description is simple. The next Medicare administrator must run a sprawling program that buys health care for approximately 42 million Americans in every state of the union, and he must simultaneously:
- Spend less money on health care (to keep Congress and the Administration from calling for your head);
- Spend more money on health care (for example by averting the 5 percent cut in physician payments scheduled to take effect next year) to keep providers from calling from your head — and seniors from doing so once they can’t find a doctor to treat them;
- Using modest carrots and no sticks, dramatically improve the mediocre quality of care currently being delivered to Medicare beneficiaries — but don’t interfere with the way in which providers deliver health care, particularly if a low-quality provider has the ear of a congressman or employs lots of people in a swing district;
- Buy lots of pharmaceuticals for seniors — but don’t pay too much (because Congress and the Administration will have your head) or too little (or the pharmaceutical companies will stop developing innovative products);
- Using inadequate and outdated information, set the price that Medicare will pay for every single good and service that beneficiaries need in every county in the United States;
- Assure Congress that you are protecting the program from fraud and abuse, even though your own fraud control personnel have doubts about whether they have the tools to do so, and the program is routinely labeled as being at “high risk” for fraud;
- Prepare Medicare for the impending tidal wave of baby boomers, who will stop paying into the system and will start expecting benefits in 2011;
- Keep a straight face while you explain that Medicare will be there for future generations, even though your trustees have determined that putting just one part of the program in actuarial balance for the next 75 years will require an “immediate 121% increase in the tax rate or an immediate 51%reduction in expenditures;”
- Surrender your every waking hour to the thankless task of bailing out a sinking ship while being forced to cheer on the efforts of your bosses (in the Administration and Congress) to drill more and bigger holes in the bottom; and finally
- Walk on water in your (non-existent) free time.
The last item on the list is obviously a stretch, but the next administrator of CMS will face all of the other challenges.
How did the Medicare program – born of such high hopes and good intentions – end up in this mess? What can we do to address these problems?
For some answers to these questions, along with a satirical perspective on the Medicare program, attend the book forum for Medicare Meets Mephistopheles at the Cato Institute on September 21, 2006. Sign up here.
