Peter Suderman and Scott Gottlieb discuss how to fix Medicare. Gottlieb discusses Medicare’s price controls such that physicians get paid the same regardless of their quality, and that insurers mimic the system. He says government authorities will tighten control over doctors, control what care they can provide.

Suderman discusses the point of his article in Reason, Medicare Whac-A-Mole Why health care price controls always fail. An excerpt:

“If we do nothing to slow these skyrocketing costs,” [Obama] said in 2009, “we will eventually be spending more on Medicare and Medicaid than every other government program combined. Put simply, our health care problem is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close.…We know we must reform this system. The question is how.”

So what innovative solution does Obama propose to begin fixing America’s biggest fiscal problem? Simple: He would change the way providers are paid for Medicare’s services. Pay less, spend less. Right? It is so obvious that one might wonder why it hasn’t been tried before. The answer is that it has—many, many times.

It is often said that you can’t put a price on health. But for decades that is exactly what the federal government has attempted. Since the birth of the entitlement, a parade of legislators and bureaucrats has been playing billion- and trillion-dollar games of Whac-A-Mole with Medicare, knocking down spending with an elaborately constructed set of technocratic payment schemes in one area only to see it rise back up in some other part of the system. Obama is merely proposing to try it one more time.