The New York Times
September 14, 2010
The Perennial Quest to Lower Health Care Spending
By Uwe Reinhardt
... the nation bravely set upon the mission of reducing the left-hand side of the dreaded health care equation — that is, National Health Care Spending = National Health Care Incomes — without the temerity of touching its right side. For obvious reasons, touching the right side always turns out to be the third rail of health reform.
Last year, health care spending in the United States absorbed slightly more than 17 percent of G.D.P. (For most other industrialized nations, the figure is still around 10 percent or less.)
What would the critics have the president and Congress do?
To explore that question, let us deconstruct national health spending, as shown in the chart below. Here we artificially assume that there is a well-defined thing called "health care," measurable in standard units that have a defined single price per unit. Thus the rendering is merely conceptual, a guide to order the discussion.
NHE = Pg x Qg x Ng + Pp x Qp x Np
where
NHE = national health expenditures
Pg = prices for health care paid by public insurers
Pp = prices for health care paid by private insurers
Qg = volume of health care used per capita under public insurance
Qp = volume of health care used per capita under private insurance
Ng = number of persons served under public insurance
Np = number of persons served under private insurance
What, then, can any president and Congress do to the variables on the right side of that equation to reduce the future trajectory of national health spending on the left-hand side, especially in the current political climate?
As we have learned in the last year, any attempt to bend down the future trajectory of public-sector fees (Pg) will be met with outcries:
(1) that hospitals and doctors will be driven into bankruptcy;
(2) that publicly-insured individuals will lose access to physicians who will refuse to work for the low public-sector fees;
(3) that doctors, hospitals and other providers who do treat publicly-insured patients have no choice but to recover more of their costs from private payers, who are assumed to have little countervailing market power to resist such increased charges.
Therefore, strike Pg from a strategy of bending the cost curve.
The future trajectory of the volume variable, Qg, might possibly be bent down ever so slightly through cost-effectiveness analysis of alternative therapeutic approaches, or by more widespread use of living wills – an idea once actively promoted by Newt Gingrich.
But those ideas were met in the past year by dark allusions to "rationing," to Nazi-style death panels and to "killing Granny." Therefore, strike lowering Qg, as well, from a strategy for bending the cost curve.
Another option is to reduce the time path of the number of people served by public insurance (Ng).
This could be done by raising eligibility thresholds for Medicaid, or raising the eligibility age for Medicare, or partially privatizing Medicare through Medicare Advantage plans, or by converting the program from a defined benefit to a defined contribution program. But any of these options would merely move health spending off the books of government and into private-sector health spending.
There is no robust empirical evidence to suggest that such a shift would lower national health spending, unless the move increased the number of uninsured Americans for whom, on average, per capita health spending is less than half of the spending incurred on similarly situated insured Americans.
In fact, shifting Medicare beneficiaries out of traditional Medicare into private Medicare Advantage plans in past years is known to have increased the burden on taxpayers and is apt to have increased overall health spending. Therefore, strike Ng as well, unless we want the number of uninsured to climb.
In sum, any attempt to reduce health spending on the public-spending side (Pg x Qg x Ng) is limited by powerful political constraints and is unlikely to reduce overall health spending – especially if the providers of health care have the market power to recoup from private payers any reductions in public health spending coming their way.
This leaves private-sector spending as a potential source of reductions in health spending. But what control does any president or Congress have over those variables (Pp x Qp x Np)?
The last president with the temerity to control spending in the private sector directly was Richard Nixon, who imposed outright price controls on the sector the mid-1970s. One can only imagine what storm of protest that approach would unleash today.
Can private insurers or patients be counted on to bend down the future path of private-sector health care prices Pp? I doubt it.
For one, neither has left a stellar record in this regard over the last three decades. Furthermore, the cost-shift argument alluded to above suggests that in most local health care markets, private payers have rather limited power to exert much downward pressure on the prices they are charged for health care.
Thus, if the future path of private-sector health spending will be deflected downward at all, it will most likely come through reductions in the per-capita utilization (Qp). That may be achieved through ever-higher cost-sharing by patients at point of service – that is, through ever-higher deductibles and ever-higher coinsurance, if not outright lack of health insurance.
Some analysts think that higher cost-sharing will also force down prices (Pp), as patients, using their own money, shop around for a deal. But that could happen only if the veil of secrecy that has traditionally kept private-sector prices opaque from patients could be lifted.
So far the quest to get this done has had only limited and temporary success.
One should, of course, not labor under the illusion that reducing use of health care (Qp) through higher cost-sharing by patients would avoid rationing health care. As every economist knows, using price and ability to pay is merely one of several approaches to rationing scarce resources among unlimited wants.
Thus, absent some miracle – for example, that bundled payments per episode of illness to so-called Accountable Health Organizations will actually serve to bend down the future time path of health spending noticeably – the nation is likely to rely in the years ahead on rationing more and more of health care by income class.
Perhaps this is what the legendary "median voter" now wants.
My posted response:
2. Don McCanne, San Juan Capistrano, CA
September 24th, 2010
Of course, other nations do provide all of their citizens with health care at a much lower level of national health expenditures (NHE). So what is there in this conceptual rendering (Professor Reinhardt's formula) that other nations have discovered and applied that we haven't?
In his May 8, 2009 blog, Professor Reinhardt provided a taxonomy of public and private financing and health insurance. Essentially all other nations have found success by using some form of social insurance. Even when private insurers are used, they function much more in the G (government) portion of the equation than they do in the P (private) portion.
Professor Reinhardt also co-authored a landmark article titled, "It's the Prices, Stupid." Thus the secret of other nations: Even if they use private insurance plans, they control national health expenditures through various means of government control of prices. In contrast, the volume of health care and number of persons remain relatively fixed. Private control of prices (market control) has played a negligible role in controlling NHE.
Although Professor Reinhardt can describe several models through which this can be accomplished, some of us remain convinced that the simplest and most efficient model would be a single payer national health program - an improved Medicare that covered everyone. Regardless, the Patient Protection and Accountable Care Act won't get us there.
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