Our country faces many serious problems (terrorism, global warming, income inequality, etc.) but the most serious of all in the long run is our rapidly growing national debt and the inability (unwillingness?) of our national leaders to address it.
Furthermore, the fundamental driver of our debt problem is the cost of healthcare, public and private. The Affordable Care Act, established in 2010, expands access to healthcare but does not address the cost problem (see chart below).
I have previously discussed how to repair the ACA to make it more cost efficient, by, for example, repealing both the individual and employer mandates, establishing a universal (and refundable) tax credit for catastrophic care, migrating Medicare and Medicaid to the new universal system, etc.
But there are lots of other things, less political contentious, that we can do as well. I have just read an astonishing new book, “An American Sickness” by Elizabeth Rosenthal, an MD who works as a healthcare journalist, which provides a vivid and compelling description of our overly expensive and dysfunctional healthcare system. According to Ms. Rosenthal here are a few of the things we could do collectively to get costs under much better control:
- Reform malpractice insurance to place limits on noneconomic damages.
- Breakup oversize hospital conglomerates so that hospitals don’t have such huge monopoly pricing power.
- State insurance regulators could do a much better job of enforcing transparency and accuracy for provider directories, in-network and out-network fees, etc.
- Insurance companies could do a better job on reference (i.e. standardized) pricing, encouraging bundling of services, tying the size of co-payments to a procedure’s medical worth and urgency, etc.
- Congress should permit Medicare to negotiate national drug prices.
Conclusion. Repairing the ACA, as is now being done in Congress, will go a long way towards much better cost control of healthcare. But there are many other common sense steps which can also be taken towards this goal.
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It Does Not Add Up 
It is not likely to changes without clearly defined down-side risk for all Primary Healthcare provider clinics or small groups, such as capitation.
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I hear thunder outside. I guess I’d better hide. Soon, I’ll probably need the new Noah’s Ark that is being assembled.
capitation is related to the bundling option which Ms. Rosenthal discusses. Perhaps routine healthcare expenses through health savings accounts could be connected with capitation.