The Center on Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), an agency in the US Department of Health and Human Services, just released a plan to make Medicare's payments to hospitals more efficient. This plan, which needs authorization from Congress to be implemented, would address one aspect of the rise in health care costs, the main driver of the long-term budget shortfall and most likely the biggest source of governmental waste now.

This plan seems to have potential, and I'd leave it to the government performance experts to evaluate it properly. It's limited mostly by design, because it would only impact payments to hospitals and seems to put less emphasis on letting people know about the comparative effectiveness of different treatments. More comprehensive plans are probably needed for all parts of the system.

Last week, the Washington Post reported on more bad news coming out of FEMA. According to a Government Accountability Office report, FEMA has wasted over $30 million in contracts for housing (read: trailers) in the last year. Wow!