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The day's big story inside-the-Beltway was a meeting of healthcare industry leaders with President Barack Obama. Well, ABC and CBS thought it was a big story, assigning White House correspondents Jake Tapper and Bill Plante to the confab. NBC disagreed, not mentioning it even in passing.
CBS' Plante pointed out that "the same groups representing doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical makers and insurers" had "bitterly and successfully" opposed Bill Clinton's plan for universal healthcare back in 1993. This time "the providers hope to block price controls and also any kind of public insurance plan" but they "also want to mandate that everyone has to be insured." The industry pledged to cut healthcare costs, which ABC's in-house physician Timothy Johnson saw as a bargaining strategy. "They are trying to build political goodwill in their fight against the public plan," he suggested. "By giving these kind of compromises and goodwill gestures they hope to have more bargaining at the table."
Yet the math of their promise to be more efficient and less bureaucratic was puzzling. ABC's Tapper told us that the industry pledged to save $2tr in healthcare spending over the next decade by cutting costs by 1.5% each year. Yet Tapper's anchor Charles Gibson told us that total annual healthcare spending is $2.5tr, or $25tr per decade. To save $2tr out of $25tr, costs have to be cut by way more than 1.5% annually.
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