Has David Cutler Lost it?
Last Friday the liberal Center for American Progress released a paper co-authored by Harvard professor David Cutler that amounted to a partisan – and thoroughly un-principled – attack on conservative entitlement reform proposals. When it comes to premium support proposals [e.g., Paul Ryan’s] in Medicare, the CAP paper alleged that traditional, government-run Medicare would be cheaper for senior citizens than a choice of private plans…
This position would be slightly less disingenuous had not both CAP and Cutler himself, in a paper Cutler co-authored earlier this month, taken the exact opposite position and put out similarly detailed projections about how much more seniors would pay — not because private plans would be less efficient than government-run Medicare, but because they would be more efficient.
Answer: Yes
Cutler cannot have it both ways. Either he can be a Obama Administration political operative; or he can do research unbiased by politics (even if that occasionally offends his friend).
I might have to switch into partisan research, it apparently pays better.
Speaking of Obama advisors, another one that amuses me is MIT economist, Jonathan Gruber. Gruber (along with Cutler) authored some cutting-edge research in the 1990s that found expanding public health coverage programs would crowd-out private coverage. For example, for every 4-newly eligible people who enrolled in Medicaid, 2 or 3 of them would have had dropped private coverage to enroll in Medicaid. Conservatives often cite this research as a reason why Medicaid expansion is not an efficient way to cover the uninsured. Congressman Rangel wrote Gruber a letter asking why conservatives were constantly citing Gruber on why creating public coverage is a bad idea. Gruber basically claimed he didn’t know why conservatives continually cited his research.
Cutler may have just lost his mind.
I agree, you can’t have it both ways.
I figure seniors (and people in general) would be more in tune to the implications behind “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Liberal always want to twist the facts.
Hypocrisy aside, I want to point out that vouchers still rely on central planning and government control.
“The Romney-Ryan plan would adjust the voucher for health status—redistributing payments from plans with healthier enrollees to plans with less healthy enrollees”
Slate has an interesting analysis here – http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/08/20/medicare_vouchers_don_t_work_here_s_why.html
The problem with the whole CAP analysis is that Cutler begins with the standard Democrat-academic meme:
“Three-fourths of all Medicare beneficiaries are currently in traditional Medicare.”
and builds all his projections off of this fallacy.
The actual indisputable fact is that 100% — not 75% — of all Medicare beneficiaries are currently in traditional Medicare. You almost always have to sign up for this crappy insurance in order to get the insurance you need.
Of the 100% of us in Traditional Medicare, 35%-40% of us also get private insurance from a former employer, 25%-30% of us also get so-called private Medicare Part C, and 15%-20% of us get truly private Medigap insurance. Another 10%-15% of us are on some other public program such as Medicaid or VA (there are some overlaps among all these groups).
That leaves less than 10% of us ONLY on Traditional Medicare. Some of that less than 10% have spouses not yet retired that cover us. Some of that less than 10% are apparently so rich that they self insure. And some — unfortunately — have fallen through the cracks despite the fact that CMS has recruited, trained and certified (and recertified annually) 25,000 volunteers working in Senior Centers and like locations to get everyone into a supplement of some sort.
Democratic academics never recognize any of these statistics
If you use the same argument to prove two completely opposing points…then yes…you are losing it!
Sounds like he doesn’t know what to believe anymore, like most of us…this system is driving even the smartest people crazy.
See the interesting twist in the “Harvard” analysis of private insurers’ ability to deliver Medicare Parts A and B more efficiently under a competitive bidding system than the government can, as mentioned in the above post. David Cutler took himself out of a new study (which appeared in the September issue of The Journal of Managed Care) using the same data.
Is that the reason that the Cutler-led trio in August hypothesized that adverse selection could be one of the three reasons that private insurers appeared to be more efficient than the government in delivering Medicare Part A and B benefits but that this trio (two of three the same but without Cutler) said:
“Our findings do not seem to be attributable to adverse selection. We controlled for the average market-level CMS-HCC risk scores of the fee-for-service beneficiary population and the Medicare Advantage population. In our sensitivity analyses, omitting either of these risk scores did not appreciably change the resulting estimates.”