Here's what Obama said in response to the first question from Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the Washington Post:
At this point, I am confident that both the House and the Senate bills will contain what we've been calling MedPAC on steroids, the idea that you continually present new ideas to change incentives, change the delivery system, understanding that because this is such a complex system we're not always going to get it exactly right the first time, and that there have to be a series of modifications over the course of a series of years, and we have to take that out of politics and make sure that an independent board of medical experts and health economists are providing packages that are continually improving the system.
In short: Obama wants to make MedPAC a powerful
independent agency whose expertise -- delivered outside the realm of
partisan squabble and constituent interests -- can guide Medicare
payments and practices to bring down its cost for taxpayers. The first
thing that empowering MedPAC reminded me of was the financial
regulation plan, which seeks to empower another independent agency, the
Federal Reserve, to roam the financial world for abuses among banking
giants.
More critically, I wonder how this statement on MedPAC jives with my Jennifer Aniston theory of Obamaism.
This is, in a nutshell, the theory that Obama prefers to tweak
incentives for private actors rather than have the government take
over. The name comes from the Aniston movie The Break-Up, where her character famously tells her live-in boyfriend that she doesn't want to do the dishes for him; nor does she want to force him to do the dishes: She wants him to want to do the dishes.
I theorized (via this TNR feature by
Noam Scheiber and Frank Foer) that Obama would try to nudge private
insurers to offer cheaper effective care. On first blush, that's what
MedPAC does. Obama even discusses it as a way to "continually present
new ideas to change incentives" for private insurers.
But
the fact that Obama wants to take Medicare policy "out of politics"
also reveals a fatal flaw in the boyfriend-girlfriend theory of
economics: Tweaking your partner's incentives is always much harder
than you think! Sometimes you need outside help. MedPAC wouldn't be
just another nudge. It would be an expert, impartial adviser living
outside the political relationship -- a marriage counselor tasked with
fixing the problems we can't fix on your own. Six months in, Obama is
beginning to learn the limits of economic Anistonism.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/07/how-relationships-help-explain-obamanomics/21970/
