When I was evaluating Joe Biden’s healthcare plan recently, I talked about how to properly evaluate policies that attempt to increase access. I think this is important enough to discuss briefly in its own post.
But first, as a brief reminder, there are traditionally three issues that healthcare reformers are attempting to solve: cost, quality, and access. And I like to combine quality and cost into one variable–value.
Access-increasing policies are typically evaluated based on (1) how many people they will cover and (2) how much they will cost, but we need to add a super important third metric in: How many barriers the policy creates to improving value.
Just because access-increasing reforms of the past have worsened healthcare value doesn’t mean they always have to do that. It just means healthcare reformers of the past haven’t known how to improve the value of healthcare, so they haven’t been able to evaluate their policies on that metric. But that’s what the Healthcare Incentives Framework is for (specifically this part of it), and that’s why I have been using it to evaluate politicians’ access-increasing policies lately.
And by the way, I’ve already written about how pretty much any universal-access system, properly implemented, can do very well on that third metric.
Clear Thinking on Healthcare 