By IAN MORRISON

Back in the early 2000s I was on the board of the California Health Care Foundation and one day the German Minister of Health paid CHCF a visit as part of a learning tour of American healthcare. Mark Smith MD CHCF’s CEO invited me to join the meeting with the minister. She was a delightful person who didn’t speak much English, but because she was accompanied by her handler/translator we managed to communicate just fine. Mark and I tried to explain to the Minister how the American healthcare system worked, and we got to the point in the conversation about the money. The essence of the “game” we described was that commercial insurers (particularly self-insured employers) paid a significant multiple of cost (sometimes in excess of 300% of costs) in order to make the math work for providers. We explained that the game works only if these purchasers paid much higher prices. I don’t speak German, but I think she said: “What The F**k?!”. Exactly.

As we enter the Post COVID world, a key question is: Will healthcare simply restart this game? Or make it even more extreme, in fact, by providers turning to those commercial insurers and self-insured employers to make up the difference for the COVID “Elective Collapse Recession” that has so traumatized provider’s finances including hospitals, specialists, primary care, and dentists leading to job cuts, furloughs, salary reductions and bankruptcies of providers.

A number of recent articles have pointed to how the game works. In particular, the always superb New York Time’s columnist Sarah Kliff’s review of the Mayo Clinic and the other highflying institutions whose excellence is rewarded not by value based reimbursement but by high prices for commercial activity under a relatively benign payor mix (industry code for “don’t see a lot of poor people, uninsured or on Medicaid”).