Tag Archives: Obamacare

How to Improve Obamacare and Lower It’s Costs

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I have been making the case for some time now that the rapidly increasing costs of U.S. health care, especially for the entitlement programs of Medicare and Medicaid, is the fundamental cause of our exploding national debt, and therefore these costs must be curtailed.  The only way to fix this problem is for Americans to have more “skin in the game” regarding these costs.
Capture10My last post, “The Inherent Instability of Obamacare,” discusses the separate but related problem that the Affordable Care Act is actuarially unsound because it misprices the basic risks involved in health insurance.  This is why costs on the exchanges are going up so fast which, in turn, leads to fewer enrollees.
A good way to address this double whammy of problems is to use a plan developed (mostly) by the American Enterprise Institute in December, 2015.  The main features are:

  • ACA Mandates, for both individuals and employers, would be abolished.
  • Retain tax preferences for employer-paid premiums, with an upper limit comparable to the cost of catastrophic health insurance.
  • Provide refundable tax credits to households without access to employer coverage, gradually replacing subsidies provided by ACA exchanges.
  • Persons with pre-existing conditions would have continuous coverage protection.
  • Medicare would migrate to a defined contribution, refundable tax credit model as above, with eligibility gradually rising to age 67.
  • Medicaid would be financed with block grants to the states and would supplement the refundable tax credit model.
  • Health Savings Accounts, to accompany high deductible plans, would be encouraged with a one-time federal tax credit matching enrollee contributions.
  • Health Care for Veterans would be integrated into mainstream care.

Summary. Abolishing the mandates means that coverage levels and price would be actuarially determined in the market place. Equal tax credits for insurance and help in setting up health savings accounts ensure fairness and widespread accessibility.  The overall free market model will guarantee both low cost and the greatest possible degree of flexibility, innovation and quality of care.

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Why Is American Healthcare So Expensive?

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The U.S. spends almost 18% of GDP on healthcare costs, double what any other developed county spends.
CaptureThere 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.
Capture1In 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.

What Will True Healthcare Reform Look Like?

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My last post, “Progress on Medicaid Reform,” discusses innovations that several states have adopted to improve the delivery of Medicaid and to make it more cost efficient. But what we really need is a complete overhaul of American healthcare, including the Affordable Care Act, as I have also recently discussed, in order to eliminate perverse marketplace incentives as well as to achieve real cost control.
CaptureAn excellent discussion of what real healthcare reform would look like is given by John Goodman in, “Healthcare Solutions for Post-Obamacare America.” Mr. Goodman gives six principles for commonsense reform:

  • Choice. People should be free to choose a health plan that fits individual and family needs, rather than one designed by bureaucrats in Washington. This means no mandates, either for individuals or employers.
  • Fairness. Any subsidy should be in the form of a fixed sum tax deduction or credit and everyone should get it as long as they obtained credible private health insurance. The amount of the subsidy would be comparable to the cost of Medicaid enrollment.
  • Universal Coverage. Since some people will turn down the offer of a tax credit, unclaimed credits can be used to reimburse safety net healthcare institutions.
  • Portability. Portability insurance should be available to employees in case they change jobs or become self-employed.
  • Patient Power. Health Savings Accounts need to be made more available and also more flexible so that they can wrap around any third-party insurance plan, as indicated in the above chart.
  • Real Insurance. Under ACA millions of people are losing access to out-of-network providers. People should be allowed to purchase “change-of-health-status insurance” in case they develop expensive-to-treat conditions.

The ACA addresses the access problem for healthcare but has little effect on the cost problem.  American healthcare, both public and private, is way too expensive.  This is why fundamental change is still needed.

What Happens When We All Live to 100?

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This is the title of an article in the current issue of Atlantic. Of course, it is a rhetorical question, but it raises a very serious issue.  There are 43 million Americans age 65 or older today and this number is expected to reach 108 million by 2050.  How will society cope with so many more senior citizens?
CaptureThis blog is concerned with the most critical fiscal and economic problems facing our country.  The biggest fiscal problem we have is how to pay for the three major entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  Social Security can be shored up with small adjustments to either the benefits formula or by raising taxes a little bit.  Medicaid can be kept under control by block-granting the program to the states.  But Medicare is a much bigger problem.
Capture1The cost of healthcare, both public and private, is rising rapidly as shown in the above chart from the New York Times.  We badly need a new approach to control costs and Avik Roy from the Manhattan Institute has given us such a plan “Transcending Obamacare: A Patient-Centered Plan for Near-Universal Coverage and Permanent Fiscal Solvency.”
The problem is that, as Mr. Roy explains, “by creating a universal, single-payer health care program for every American over 65, regardless of financial or medical need, the drafters of Medicare made the program extremely difficult to reform.”  But now we have to reform it because the costs are becoming so huge.  How do we do it?
First of all, Mr. Roy’s plan keeps the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act and turns them all into state-based exchanges.  It also eliminates both the individual and employer mandates, replacing these mandates with financial incentives.
Mr. Roy’s core Medicare reform is very simple.  The plan increases the Medicare eligibility age by four months each year.  The result is to preserve Medicare for current retirees, and to maintain future retirees – in the early years of their retirement – on their exchange-based or employer-sponsored health plans.  In other words, retirees will gradually be migrated to the same system, with the same level of subsidy, as for working people.
Everyone, workers and retirees alike, will be treated the same. Not only is this an eminently fair system, it insures that Medicare remains affordable, for both retirees and the whole country.

Does Economic Growth Depend on Healthcare Expansion?

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Even though economic growth is much too slow, it has been steadily increasing since the end of the Great Recession at a rate of about 2.2% per year.  But our economy actually shrunk at a 2.9% rate in the first quarter of 2014.  Healthcare spending decreased by 6.9% in the first quarter and therefore contributed to this overall drop in GNP.
CaptureThe New York Times’ economic reporter, Neil Irwin, discusses the connection, ”Our Economic Growth Is a Mystery.  Obamacare is the Reason.” in yesterday’s paper.  Since healthcare makes up one-sixth of the economy, and the implementation of Obamacare is expanding the healthcare sector, it is not surprising that the economy stumbles if Obamacare stumbles.
But he continues “The United States also has the most expensive healthcare system in the world, without producing better health outcomes.  If the nation succeeds in reducing health care costs while also getting coverage for more people, it would be a huge win for the country’s long term competitiveness.  Overtime the dollars that aren’t being spent on overpriced or unneeded health services can go to other stuff which makes life better: houses, college education, restaurant meals and the like.”
Conclusion:  we need to try all the harder to figure out how to grow the economy faster.  The best single thing we can do about this is to implement fundamental tax reform whereby individual tax rates are cut across the board, paid for by closing many of the loopholes and deductions which primarily benefit the rich.  The two thirds of taxpayers who do not itemize deductions will automatically receive a tax reduction in this way.  Since they are middle and lower income wage earners, with largely stagnant incomes, they will tend to spend their tax savings, thereby boosting the economy.
The loopholes enjoyed by the wealthy are example of crony capitalism which both liberals and conservatives complain about.  Closing these loopholes and other deductions is a very good way to lessen income inequality.  Our leaders should be able to work together in this direction!

The Economic Effect of ObamaCare

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Last week’s report from the Congressional Budget Office “The Economic Outlook: 2014 – 2024” (which I discussed in my last post) caused a big stir with its prediction that ObamaCare will cause a loss of 2,000,000 mostly low wage jobs by 2017 and 2,500,000 such jobs by 2024.  The lost jobs aren’t necessarily from workers being fired or fewer workers being hired but rather the overall decreased incentive for individuals to find work.  The CBO analysis is based on the research of the economist Casey Mulligan featured in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal as “The Economist Who Exposed ObamaCare”.
CaptureThe above chart of Mr. Mulligan interprets several recent government subsidy programs as a new marginal tax rate, i.e. the “extra taxes paid and government benefits foregone as a result of earning an extra dollar of income.”  The 2009 stimulus, the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, had an effect like this but it was temporary.  The marginal tax increase of the Affordable Care Act will last as long as it remains in effect.
Capture1The above chart from the same CBO report, showing the steady decline in the Labor Force Participation Rate from the year 2000 onward, demonstrates the critical nature of this problem.  Lower labor force participation means lower growth in overall labor productivity which in turn means slower economic growth.  Since the Great Recession ended in June 2009, GDP growth has averaged only about 2% annually.
Slow GDP growth means, in addition to a higher unemployment rate, that America’s standard of living will not increase very rapidly if at all.  But the problem is really much worse than this.  We have an enormous debt problem which is only getting worse every year that we continue to have large deficits.  The CBO report predicts increasing growth in the size of our national debt.  By far the least painful way of shrinking our debt (relative to the size of the economy) is to grow the economy as fast as we reasonably can.  But our economy is actually slowing down, not speeding up!
This is a very serious problem which many of our national leaders are much too complacent about!

An Optimistic View of America’s Future!

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In the latest issue of Barron’s, Frederick Rowe, the managing partner of Greenbrier Partners Capital Management, asks in “More Than a Sugar High?” , “Can you imagine a country that is managed in an economically rational manner, creating the wealth that’s necessary to take proper care of the citizens who get left behind? … What if our economic recovery is more than a sugar high?  What if there is more here than insanely stimulative monetary policy from the Federal Reserve?  What if the U.S. has already begun to steer an economic course to a period of unprecedented and genuine prosperity, achievement, and problem solving?”
Here are eight factors which Mr. Rowe gives to point us in the right direction:

  • North American Energy Independence (already on the horizon).
  • Sensible Immigration Reform: encouraging our most enterprising and hard-working people to become citizens rather than chasing them away.
  • Repatriation of Corporate Income: if a company domiciled in the U.S. makes money in Argentina and wants to invest it in the U.S. we double-tax the daylights out of it.  It would be hard to imagine a more counterproductive tax policy.
  • Changing Directors and Their Thinking: the once unthinkable mindset of corporate directors acting on behalf of long-term owners (rather than the CEOs with whom they play golf) is actually gaining traction.
  • Lowering Corporate Taxes: the tax-writing committees in Congress are working on this.
  • Increasing Technological Leadership: the most dynamic technology companies in the world are domiciled in the U.S. Technology, in the short run, displaces workers.  But eventually workers catch up because new technology creates new kinds of jobs that were never imagined before.
  • Americanization of the World: more than three billion people around the world will soon be able to afford to live much more like the 300 million Americans do.  So companies which make it big here have an automatic global opportunity.
  • Obamacare:  Even this bureaucratic catastrophe provides a large opportunity for economic opportunity.  Think of Jimmy Carter’s failures which led to Ronald Reagan’s successes.

“Let your imagination run and consider all the things that can be accomplished by an energy-independent, cash-generating, cash-repatriating country that is a hotbed of technological innovation.”
I can’t possibly say it any better than this!