The Quality of American Health Care

Posted on February 11, 2016 by jackheidel

One of the most common themes on this website is the high cost of American healthcare. What I am saying is that our annual deficits are way too high and that our accumulated debt is increasing too fast. Furthermore, the only way to get the cost of healthcare entitlements, Medicare and Medicaid, under control, is to get the overall cost of private healthcare under control as well. And, of course, I support specific policies to do just this.
It so happens that I have just had a major interaction with the American healthcare system in Omaha NE where I live. I go jogging first thing in the morning, five days a week, all year around. I have done this all my life and have never had a problem – until last Monday morning when I slipped on some ice, fell down and fractured my wrist. What I did then was:

Call off my 8:00 A.M. Calculus class
My wife, Sharon, took me to a Minor Medical facility at 8:00 A.M. just as it opened.
The facility x-rayed my wrist and determined that I had broken several bones.
They then located an orthopedic surgeon who could see me the same day at 2:50 P.M.
The surgeon scheduled me for surgery the very next morning.
The surgery was successful and I am now recovering.
In other words, 30 hours after my accident occurred, I had had an intense inter-action with American medicine and came through with flying colors.
To say the least, I am very impressed with the quality of the facilities and healthcare professionals with whom I interacted.

It may cost an arm and a leg for this superb medical treatment but then I have excellent health insurance which I have seldom had to make use of.
Conclusion: Although we must make significant changes in healthcare delivery in the U.S., to make the system more cost efficient, we should try hard to do this without affecting the high degree of quality inherent in the system.

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An Off-Ramp from Obama Care

Posted on June 16, 2015 by jackheidel

The Supreme Court will soon render an opinion in King v. Burwell, challenging the implementation of the Affordable Care Act which stipulates that subsidies can only be paid “through an Exchange established by the State.” If the plaintiffs are upheld, it will mean that anyone receiving health insurance through one of the federal exchanges operating in 33 states is not eligible to receive a subsidy. It will be necessary for Congress to intervene to fix a problem like this.
Three committee chairs in the House of Representatives, John Kline, Paul Ryan and Fred Upton, are proposing to take such an opportunity to improve the Affordable Care Act along the following lines:

First of all, making health insurance more affordable by ending both the individual and employer mandates, and giving choices back to the states, individuals and families.
Secondly, supporting Americans in purchasing the coverage of their choosing. For example, people could save money by buying insurance across state lines.
Finally, many existing features of the ACA would be retained. Children could stay on their parents policies until age 26. Lifetime limits on benefits would be prohibited. People with existing conditions would be protected. Renewability would be guaranteed. Insurance would be decoupled from employment by offering equal (perhaps, age adjusted) tax credits for all.

There remains the practical problem of providing immediate assistance to the approximately 5 million people currently receiving subsidies through the federal exchanges, while larger scale changes are being worked out by Congress. The American Enterprise Institute has proposed a simple way for Congress to do this as follows:

Enact a short-term extension of subsidies for current enrollees.
States with federal exchanges could immediately set up a state exchange if they wished.
People with preexisting conditions and/or continuous coverage would be protected.

Both quality control and cost control are badly needed to make the ACA sustainable for the long run. Given the right decision in King v. Burwell, these two plans outline a possible way to accomplish this.

Why Is American Healthcare So Expensive?

Posted on April 21, 2015 by jackheidel

The U.S. spends almost 18% of GDP on healthcare costs, double what any other developed county spends.
There are many reasons for our excessive healthcare spending. For example:

As illustrated in the above chart, many medical procedures are far more expensive here than in other countries.
Profit levels in the healthcare industry are often very high, for example: 16.4% for pharmaceuticals, health-care information 9.4%, home healthcare firms 8.5%, medical labs 8.2% and generic drug makers 6.5%.
Health insurers, on the contrary, have a very low profit margin, (2.2% in 2009), and so can hardly be blamed for the high cost of healthcare.

The Affordable Care Act greatly expands access to healthcare but does very little to control costs. The Manhattan Institute’s Avik Roy has outlined a plan, “Transcending Obamacare: A Patient Centered Plan for Near-Universal Coverage and Permanent Solvency” which would reform Obamacare by making it more like two very successful and low cost consumer-driven plans, those in Switzerland and Singapore.
These two countries feature government sponsored health savings accounts, backed up by insurance for catastrophic care. What happens is that out-of-pocket spending for healthcare per individual is higher in Switzerland and Singapore than it is in the U.S., as indicated in the chart below.
In other words, the real reason for our high cost of healthcare is that Americans don’t have enough “skin in the game.” We have very little incentive to hold down the cost of our own care because it is mostly paid for by third party insurance companies.
As the cost of healthcare continues to climb, such changes are already beginning to creep into the health insurance market place. Private companies are raising the deductibles on the insurance plans which they subsidize. The bronze, silver, gold and platinum plans on the ACA exchanges differ largely by the level of the insurance deductible.
Avik Roy’s plan referred to above in essence speeds up the process of converting the ACA into an efficient, consumer-driven healthcare system by making it more flexible and therefore more adaptable to market forces.

Controlling the Cost of Healthcare

Posted on December 3, 2013 by jackheidel

The New York Times is running a series of articles, “Paying Till It Hurts,” giving many examples of the very high cost of healthcare in the U.S. today. The latest article “As Hospital Prices Soar, A Single Stitch Tops $500”, focuses on the high cost of emergency room treatment around the country.
We spend 18% of GDP on healthcare, twice as much as any other country in the world. It is specifically the cost of healthcare entitlements, Medicare and Medicaid, which is driving our huge deficits and rapidly growing national debt. But to limit the cost of these entitlement programs, we first have to address the more fundamental problem: how to control the overall cost of healthcare in general.
Our current healthcare system, a combination of private insurance and government programs, is very inefficient. The basic problem is that the tax treatment of employer provided health insurance takes away the incentive for individuals to control the cost of their own care. And Obamacare does not solve this problem, because it just extends the present system to more people, rather than revamping it.
There are essentially two different ways to transform our current healthcare system to make it far more efficient. One way is to turn it into a single payer system, like what most of the rest of the world has. This could be accomplished by simply expanding Medicare to everyone. Costs would then be controlled by government regulation which would, of course, include rationing. Given the unpopularity of Obamacare, with all of its mandates and uniform coverage requirements, it is unlikely that Americans would be happy with such a highly proscribed single payer system.
The alternative is to change over to a truly consumer based, market oriented system. This could be accomplished by limiting the present tax exemption for employer provided insurance. For example, the current system could be replaced by a (refundable) tax credit equal to the cost of catastrophic insurance (i.e. insurance with a very high deductible). All other healthcare costs, whether paid for directly by consumers or through insurance, would be with after tax dollars. Subsidies could be provided to lower income people through the Obamacare exchanges. Once such a system is set up and running smoothly, it could fairly easily be extended to encompass Medicare and Medicaid.
Insurance companies selling catastrophic coverage would negotiate with hospitals and other healthcare providers to get the lowest possible prices for their customers. In other words, both insurance companies and providers would compete in the open market to deliver healthcare products at the lowest possible cost.
Something along this line will have to be done and the sooner we get started the better!

Why Is Obamacare So Unpopular? Because It’s Too Coercive!

Posted on November 26, 2013 by jackheidel

The individual mandate for health insurance, upheld by the Supreme Court a year and a half ago, is now leading to millions of policy cancellations in the individual insurance market. The mandate overrides any existing policy which does not provide minimum coverage. The employer mandate, stipulating that any business with 50 or more employees must provide health insurance for all fulltime employees, has caused many businesses to replace fulltime employees with part-timers.
But these are not the only forms of coercion under Obamacare. As reported in yesterday’s New York Times, “Court Confronts Religious Rights of Corporations”, the Supreme Court is expected to accept a case involving the Hobby Lobby’s refusal, on religious grounds, to pay for insurance coverage for the contraceptive coverage which is required to meet minimum standards.
It would be much better to replace all of these coercive mandates with economic incentives. This could actually be done in such a way that would also make healthcare less expensive, thereby giving a big boost to our economy. Here is one way to do this, as I discussed in my November 14, 2013 post:

Provide a flat and universal tax credit for health insurance coverage which applies to everyone and not just for employer provided healthcare. The (refundable) credit would be roughly the amount necessary for catastrophic insurance coverage.
Convert Medicare and Medicaid into a means-based addition to this tax credit.
Everyone with continuous coverage (paid for by the tax credit) would be protected from price spikes or cancellations if they get sick. This provides a strong incentive for everyone to buy and retain coverage.

It is entitlement spending which is driving our country’s fiscal crisis. And healthcare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid make up a big part of entitlements. In order to get these costs under control, we need to first get the cost of private healthcare under control. The best way to do this is with economic incentives rather than coercive mandates.
Obamacare doesn’t need to be repealed. It could just as well be modified and improved as described above.

Beyond ObamaCare: Where Do We Go From Here?

Posted on November 14, 2013 by jackheidel

Last Sunday’s Washington Post has an Op Ed column by Jon Kingsdale, “Beyond Healthcare.gov, Obamacare’s Other Challenges” which describes the many challenges confronting ObamaCare besides just the website problems and the millions of individual policies which will be cancelled for not meeting the minimum requirements of the Affordable Care Act. Based on his experience setting up the Massachusetts Health Insurance Exchange from 2006-2010, there will be huge problems in getting enrollment, billing and premium collections working smoothly for such a large government program. For example, an estimated 27% of those who will be eligible for tax credits under the ACA do not have checking accounts. How will their monthly premiums be paid and tracked for these people if they’re late?
Considering all of the problems involved in the implementation of ObamaCare, and the fact that it does not really reform our current very costly healthcare system but rather just extends it to cover more people, it makes much sense to move toward real healthcare reform, which will control costs.
A column in today’s Wall Street Journal by Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin, “A Conservative Alternative to ObamaCare”, lays out several basic features which should be included in a sensible, market oriented approach to healthcare reform. The principles are:

A flat and universal tax credit for coverage which applies to everyone and not just for employer provided healthcare. The (refundable) credit would be roughly the amount necessary for catastrophic coverage.
Medicaid could be converted into a means-based addition to this tax credit.
Everyone with continuous coverage (which would be provided by the tax credit) would be protected from price spikes or cancellations if they get sick. This provides a strong incentive to buy and retain coverage without the need for a mandate.

A market oriented healthcare system like this is not only preferable to all of the mandates and restrictions of Obamacare, it also improves our current system by both expanding coverage to more people as well as controlling costs by giving health consumers (all of us) a much bigger stake in purchasing healthcare.
The United States spends 18% of GDP on healthcare, twice as much as any other country in the world. Our fiscal stability and future prosperity depend on getting this huge and growing cost under control. The ObamaCare fiasco provides an excellent opportunity to get started on doing this.

Private Health Care Reform is Getting Started!

Posted on September 5, 2013 by jackheidel

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article, “More Employers Overhaul Health Benefits”, which describes a movement just getting started whereby employers give their employees a fixed sum of money and let them choose their own plan from an online market place. The idea is that employers will be better able to predict and control their healthcare expenses for employees. Furthermore, employees will be able to get better value for dollars spent by selecting their own coverage options, deductible amounts, copays, etc.
In fact, in an exchange run by Liazon Corp., which has 60,000 people enrolled, 75% of workers have chosen less expensive plans than they had before, by accepting bigger deductibles and copays, as well as smaller choices of healthcare providers and restrictions such as primary-care gatekeepers.
This is such an appealing approach to private healthcare cost control that the Accenture Management Consulting Company estimates just five years from now there will be 40,000,000 business employees receiving their healthcare benefits in this manner. This would be a phenomenal development!
The United States spends 18% of GDP on healthcare altogether, both public and private, which is double the amount spent by any other country. This enormous expense is a major reason why wage growth is stagnant in our country as well as why the costs of public programs like Medicare and Medicaid are so high and contributing to so much government debt. It is critical for our country to get the rapid increase of healthcare costs under much better control. That’s why this new movement of employers and employees working together on this critical problem is such a big step in the right direction.
If the estimate by Accenture is anywhere nearly accurate about how fast this new private healthcare selection method will grow, then there will soon be an excellent opportunity for Congress to expand its benefits to the control of Medicare and Medicaid costs as well. This is very exciting indeed!

How Can We Boost Stagnant Wages?

Posted on August 26, 2013 by jackheidel

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a column by Neil Shah, “Stagnant Wages Crimping Economic Growth”, pointing out that the average hourly pay for non-supervisory workers, adjusted for inflation, has declined to $8.77 last month from $8.86 in June 2009, when the recession ended. It has also been reported recently, e.g. in the New York Times, that U.S. medium household income, now at $52,100, has not nearly recovered from its prerecession peak of $55,500 and is even below its $54,500 level in June 2009, at the end of the recession.
Lower income for workers and households mean lower consumer spending. This is a major reason for our economy’s low annual growth rate of only 2% of GDP since the end of the recession. Of course, the high unemployment rate, currently 7.4%, as well as increasing global competition, contribute to downward pressure on wages. But there is another factor, directly under government control, which is a major contributor to stagnant and declining wages.
Washington Post columnist, Robert Samuelson, in a recent column reprinted in the Omaha World Herald, reported that, from 1999 to 2013, wages and salaries rose 50% (adjusted for inflation) while health insurance premiums increased 182%.
Most health insurance is provided and largely paid for by employers and is therefore an indirect form of compensation. The huge disparity between wage gains and health insurance premium increases in recent years means that wages are being held back by the rapidly increasing cost of health care. The U.S. spends 18% of GDP on healthcare, twice as much as any other country and this is clearly out of line.
The best single thing we can do to slow down healthcare inflation is to remove the tax exemption for employer provided healthcare (and offset it with lower overall tax rates). Employees would then pay taxes on their health insurance benefits as part of their pay. This would have the beneficial effect of making consumers far more conscious of the true cost of healthcare and therefore consumers a strong incentive to hold down these costs.
It is up to Congress to change this provision of the tax code. Let’s insist that they get this done!

Is the Cost of Health Care Under Control?

Posted on August 21, 2013 by jackheidel

Today’s New York Times reports that “Health Care Costs Climb Moderately, Survey Says”. The average annual insurance premium for a family rose 4% in 2013 compared with a 1.1% overall rate of inflation, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation which conducted the survey. Since 1999 health insurance premiums have increased by almost 300% while consumer prices have increased by 40%. As insurance premiums rise, deductibles are also getting bigger. About 38% of all covered workers now face an annual deductible of $1000 or greater. Dr. Drew Altman, CEO of the Kaiser Foundation, refers to this “quiet revolution” as an attempt by consumers to keep the cost of health insurance from rising even more quickly.
A 4% increase in insurance costs may seem moderate, but at almost four times the rate of inflation, it is really very large. Obama Care is unlikely to have any impact in holding down such a rapid increase and, in fact, is likely to make matters worse because of massive new health care regulations which are coming. The basic problem is that America spends 18% of GDP overall on health care, almost twice as much as any other country.
What can we do about this? One major step would go a long way. We need to remove the tax exemption from employer provided health insurance. Employers could still provide health insurance for their employees, but the cost would be added to an employee’s salary for tax purposes. This can be offset with a lower tax rate, of course. But it would make employees, i.e. all consumers, far more conscious of the cost of healthcare and therefore to have a direct incentive to hold down these costs. For example, Dr. Altman’s “quiet revolution” would pick up steam as employees raise deductibles even higher in order to lower overall costs.
How can we get going in this direction? The Employer Mandate of Obama Care should be repealed, and not just postponed for a year. Ideally, removing the tax exemption for employer provided health insurance would become part of the broad based tax reform which is so badly needed to stimulate the economy.
Our fiscal and economic problems can be addressed with smart leadership. We should insist that our national leaders get going on such badly needed reforms!

Is Our Economy Truly Recovering From the Recession?

Posted on July 18, 2013 by jackheidel

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Mortimer Zuckerman, the Chairman of U.S. News and World Report, writes that “A Jobless Recovery is a Phony Recovery”. He points out that counting the people who want full time work and can’t get it, as well as those who have stopped looking, the real unemployment rate is really 14.3% rather than the officially reported 7.6%. Enormous fiscal (deficit spending) and monetary (quantitative easing) stimulus has been able to stimulate an average growth rate of only 2% for the past four years since the recession ended in June 2009. During these last four years the civilian workforce-participation rate has actually declined from 65.7% to 63.5% which has never happened before in an even slowly expanding “recovery” like we have at the present time.
Keynesians and Obama Administration apologists say that we need even more fiscal stimulus (we can worry about deficits and debt later); tax reform won’t help because tax rates are already low; massive new regulations (ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank financial regulations, EPA environmental regulations) are so important that they override negative economic effects; etc. At some point, the sooner the better, we need to recognize that current policies are not working and are, in fact, retarding the recovery from the recession.
Tax reform is the biggest single change which would help. Removing deductions and tax preferences, and replacing them with lower tax rates, would give a big boost to investment and entrepreneurship, and thereby be a huge stimulus to the economy. This includes eliminating the tax exemption for employer provided health insurance. Combining this reform with repeal of ObamaCare’s Employer Mandate would also lead to getting the cost of healthcare under much better control. The overall cost of healthcare, 18% of the American economy and growing, is a huge long term burden and must be turned around.
The massive complexity of Dodd-Frank is a huge burden on the financial industry. Preventing banks from becoming “too big to fail” can be accomplished by having more adequate reserve requirements along with sufficient default and liquidity insurance pools, along with otherwise minimal regulation.
Only more private investment and risk taking can make the economy grow faster and bring down the unemployment rate. The sooner our national policy makers (and the voters who elect them!) figure this out and act accordingly, the sooner that our economy will truly begin to recover from the Great Recession.

It Does Not Add Up

Jack Heidel's blog on fiscal responsibility

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