skin in the game – The Health Care Blog

The Way Out of the Wilderness

Aug 17, 2012• 37

By David Dranove

In 1932, the Committee on the Cost of Medical Care identified rising medical costs as a threat to the financial security of millions of Americans. In a series of studies that created the field of health services research, the Committee recommended several strategies for cost containment that reads like a blueprint for today’s cost containment efforts: prevention, price controls, capitation, elimination of unnecessary care, and integration. If it sounds like a précis of my previous two blogs – cut prices and cut quantities – it should. We have known for a long time that those are the only ways to cut spending. And yet here we are, 80 years later, facing a spending crisis that threatens to take down the entire economy.

In my lifetime, we have been subjected to a steady drumbeat of rising medical costs. There have been respites – for a couple of years after Medicare introduced DRGs and for about five years in the 1990s during the heyday of HMOs. While DRGs and HMOs shifted costs down, they did not seem to reverse underlying growth trends, although HMOs did not thrive for long enough to be certain.

Not for lack of trying have medical costs continued to increase. We promote prevention, regulate prices, capitate providers, and review utilization to eliminate wasteful spending. We have seen horizontal integration that led to market power and higher costs, and vertical integration that more often than not created unmanageable bureaucracies. Most of today’s proposals for cost containment can be encapsulated by two words: “Try harder.” The Affordable Care Act gives us free preventive care, stricter price controls, ACOs, and the Comparative Effectiveness Institute. We need radical change but all we get is creeping incrementalism. I will take creeping incrementalism over the do-nothing approach of the previous decade, if only because we could use another respite. But the ACA is no permanent fix.

Why High Deductible Plans Matter

Jun 19, 2012• 27

By Paul Levy

Someone once showed me an analysis that demonstrated that the sum of workers’ salaries and benefits has stayed remarkably constant in real terms over the last two decades. This means that companies have compensated for the increasing cost of health insurance over time by holding back on wage increases.

You can understand this. After all, if companies are not able to increase the price of goods and services they sell to the public, they need to hold factor costs relatively constant. So if it was costing them more and more to provide health insurance to their workers, an offsetting amount would have to be removed from possible wage increases.

This dynamic is still in place, but it is showing up in a different way, by shifting costs to workers in the form of higher deductible health insurance policies. Deductibles are different from co-pays, where you plunk down $15 or $20 for each appointment or prescription. With deductibles, you pay the first costs incurred as you and your family make use of the health care system, the entire cost of the office visit or of the prescription, until a preset amount is reached. After that level is reached, you still pay the co-pays. A recent story in the Washington Post documented this trend.

Currently, this kind of high-deductible policy is often combined with health saving accounts that are funded by the employer. These accounts let patients buy medical services and drugs with pretax dollars. So, although your insurance plan might require you to pay more of a deductible out of your own money, you could still use the HSA to cover those out-of-pocket expenses.

A Health Care Setup Both Sides Could Live With

Apr 28, 2012• 5

By Donald H. Taylor Jr.

Before long the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the health care reform law, a decision that will have tremendous policy ramifications and could reshape the presidential election.

But even if the court overturns the Affordable Care Act, as some observers predict, that won’t change the reality that our country’s health care system is seriously broken. In short, regardless of what the court says, people will still be getting sick, costs will keep rising and too many people will be uninsured. And our federal budget will never be sustainable if we can’t bring health care costs under control.

The Democratic Party and progressives invested a huge amount of political capital in getting Congress to pass the ACA in 2010. The act was not perfect, but it did provide a start to the many years of work needed to create a sustainable health care system. In speeches, Republicans and conservatives acknowledge that our health care system is unsustainable and have spoken of a need to “replace”; however, in the two years since the ACA passed, they have failed to be clear about what they actually favor.

As we look to what we’re actually going to do about the problem, what’s clear is that progressives and conservatives both need to move beyond their familiar positions to find a new kind of deal. This seems politically impossible before November, but politicians on both sides would do themselves – and the country – a big favor if they quietly started devising a solution that everyone can live with, even if neither side gets everything it wants.

For progressives, universal coverage has always been the Holy Grail and dream deferred, not just of health policy, but of all social policy. I don’t think conservatives have a health policy interest that is so clear and heartfelt as universal coverage is for progressives, but if I had to take a stab, I think it is their belief that people don’t have enough “skin in the game” and are therefore wasteful of other people’s money.