There are arguments out there that say we need to cover everything for everyone; that it’s immoral to ration care. Each human life is priceless, and choosing not to pay for a service that could save or prolong a life is trying to put a price on something that is priceless. It violates the moral test of government:
The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
Former U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey
I disagree. And having recently read The Road to Serfdom by Hayek, I’ll put it in his terms because he’s given the best explanation of the counter-argument.
If we spend all that money on healthcare and ignore all the other potential uses for that same money, we are making a huge spending decision without even being able to determine whether that money was put to its best use.
How about an example?
If a grandma has the choice to (1) spend $300,000 on cancer treatment that is likely to give her about two more months of life or (2) spend that same sum on 4 years of university tuition for her granddaughter who would not otherwise be able to afford university, what would she choose? Maybe some would choose to live two months longer, but I suspect most grandmothers would put a price on their own life by choosing a better use for that money.
I know–she’s getting to make the decision for herself, which is a very important difference. But I hope the principle is clear: Governments could choose to spend a huge portion of their limited resources on covering every single healthcare service for every single person, but that crowds out other virtuous options, such as school lunches for low-income kids, housing programs for the homeless, mental health treatment for incarcerated individuals, . . .
If we don’t let micro- and macro-considerations of the alternative uses of limited resources enter into our economic decisions, we are headed down the same road that all planned economies in the past have traveled.
In last week’s post, I summarized this article, which is the last in the Fundamentals of U.S. Health Policy series published by The New England Journal of Medicine. The article was written by Michael Chernew, Ph.D., and discusses the role of market forces (more specifically, competition) in improving our healthcare delivery system.
I’m heavily biased toward using competition inasmuch as it is possible (for good reason), but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to our failed attempts at improving competition in healthcare. And Dr. Chernew does a great job summarizing many of those failed attempts while remaining optimistic that competition still has a role in improving our healthcare delivery system.
I completely agree with his conclusion that where the market fails, we need government involvement. It’s a conclusion that is commonly agreed upon amongst researchers in this field.
But the difference between me and most other health policy researchers is this: I believe the market will work to a much greater degree than others do. Maybe this is because my original bias toward decentralized decisions and efficiency led me to question harder why all those supposedly market-improving reforms failed.
Others may say, “Well, all these reforms failed, so I guess the market just won’t work in healthcare, so let’s see what the government can do to fix this mess instead.” But I say, “Let’s figure out why they failed. And if the reason they failed is because markets just won’t work in healthcare, great! Let’s turn to the government for help.”
The answers I’ve found over the last several years about why all those competition-improving efforts have failed tell me that markets can work to an extensive degree in healthcare, we’ve just never created the environment for it to happen.
I’m passionate about this because if we don’t understand that environment and then create it, the future fiscal health of most countries will sooner or later be ruined because the non-market government solutions they’ve come up with so far are insufficient at stimulating the cost-reducinginnovation necessary to make healthcare systems sustainable.
My concerns with Dr. Chernew’s paper are in the section where he lists all the ways transparency efforts and benefit design change efforts have failed and then gives as the explanation for these failures that, “The core problem is that for markets to work, patients must face the economic consequences of their choices, but labor-market concerns dampen employers’ enthusiasm for adopting plans that impose such consequences.”
Translation: Employers don’t want to force employees to face big out-of-pocket spending in the plans they offer them because that’s not popular among employees, which will lead to employee dissatisfaction and possibly even lead to the best recruits choosing other jobs. And so employers are unwilling to adopt the insurance plan benefit designs that are necessary to make competition work in healthcare.
I disagree for a few reasons. First, an insurance plan does not have to make the patient pay the entire price out of pocket for them to be price sensitive. They only have to make the patient pay some of the price difference between their provider options. Second, employers can offer a few plan options to employees, only one of which would impose such requirements. Third, if there were multiple plan options to choose from, the one with such requirements would likely be fairly popular because the premium would be much lower on account of all the savings generated by those requirements leading enrollees to choose lower-priced providers.
The main potential limiter to the popularity of such a plan would probably be in its implementation. Is there an app that the patient can use that would easily tell them the provider options in their region and what their out-of-pocket cost would be for each one? Better yet, does that app also integrate patient-relevant quality information? Such apps are out there. And providing an explanation about the benefit design purpose and the accompanying app in the plan’s description would probably overcome a big chunk of the issues causing people not to use transparency information.
So I disagree with Dr. Chernew’s implication that competition in healthcare is going to be fairly limited because employers are unwilling to implement such plans. I actually wonder if there aren’t already groups of large employers banding together in different regions of this country making plans to all make such benefit designs available to their employees at the same time in an effort to get so many people in the region choosing based on quality and price that the providers are forced to respond in value-improving ways. (If any employers are out there considering such an attempt, I am happy to advise!)
But I do think that this last topic was the perfect one to end the series with, and Dr. Chernew was one of the best people they could have chosen to address the topic so effectively. How to increase the efficiency of the delivery system is the big challenge that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats seem to have an answer to, but it’s the issues that is going to loom larger in the future, especially if we turn to more administrative pricing and quickly discover that the price floor (the point at which the price is too low because it makes providers unprofitable) is actually incredibly high.
Well, that wraps it up for this series. I learned a ton and I appreciate NEJM’s efforts to educate more people about health policy!
It’s a market. Photo by Mark Stebnicki on Pexels.com
This is the last part of the Fundamentals of U.S. Health Policy series! And it’s a super interesting one. Michael Chernew, Ph.D., wrote about the role of market forces in U.S. health care. Since this is squarely in my area of focus, I have a lot of thoughts. Thus, this week I’ll stick to summarizing Dr. Chernew’s article, and then next week I’ll provide some commentary.
Forewarning, I’m following the paper’s logic flow, which, to my brain, is a little meandering, so it’s easy to lose one’s place, but I’ll clarify as much as I can now and then attempt to provide additional insight next week.
Remember how Total Healthcare Spending = Price x Quantity? (Well, actually, it’s the sum of the price x quantity of all the different services being provided in our healthcare system.) Dr. Chernew is basically using that equation when he starts out by saying that our challenge is to reduce the quantity of low-value services provided and to lower prices.
And then the big question . . .
What role should markets play in doing that?
He finally gets to the answer at the end, which is that markets and government should both be used to complement each other. Markets can be leveraged inasmuch as they will help, and this should be paired with the government regulations needed to help them work as well as they can.
I won’t list his specific recommendations quite yet about how we could do that because first I need to review what he says in the rest of the article about markets and how they work.
First, he says that markets are the “foundation of our economy,” and they promote efficient production and cost-reducing innovation. He doesn’t exactly give the step-by-step explanation of how they do that, but you can gather it from his next several paragraphs. Markets create competition, which is when consumers (in this case, patients) have “the ability and incentives . . . to seek low-price, high-quality providers. . . .” And because of that competitive pressure to win consumers, the players in a market are forced to innovate in ways that make production more efficient.
Great, so a good healthcare market will help patients choose low-price, high-quality providers. Unfortunately, healthcare markets are more imperfect than other markets. Want a big piece of evidence for this? Look at the extent of unwarranted price variations that exist in healthcare. It’s way more than in other markets.
But why is the healthcare market so bad?
“Competition in health care fails for several fundamental reasons. First, patients often lack the information needed to assess both their care needs and the quality of their care. Second, illness and health care needs are inherently difficult to predict, exposing people to financial risks that they must insure against. This risk gives rise to an insurance system that shields patients from the price of care, dampening their incentive to use care judiciously and to seek care from providers offering high-quality care at affordable prices. The information problem, amplified by insurance, reduces the ability and incentives for patients to seek low-price, high-quality providers and impedes well-functioning markets. This problem has been magnified lately by consolidation of health care providers.”
So, basically, it’s difficult for patients to really know what care they need, they have a hard time assessing quality of care, they’re shielded from prices because of insurance, and consolidation has limited their options. The result of all that is they have neither the ability nor the incentives to choose low-price, high-quality providers.
This, by the way, sounds almost exactly like what I’ve written (or linked to) a thousand times before, which is that patients need to start making value-sensitive decisions, and to do that they need (1) multiple options, (2) the ability to identify the value of each option, and (3) the incentive to choose the highest-value option.
Regarding consolidation, he gives some interesting data, which show that only 51% of markets have 3 or more hospital systems.
Based on all of that, many would conclude that we should abandon markets altogether in healthcare. But he says, “The weaknesses associated with market-based health care systems are severe, but that does not mean the market should be abandoned.”
And then he proceeds to give a few examples of beneficial things that have come from markets already, such as new payment models, telemedicine, a shift from inpatient to outpatient care, and narrow networks (which allows for lower prices).
Those, however, end up being overshadowed by the list of ways we’ve tried and failed to bolster market function by providing patients with better information about quality and prices and by changing insurance benefit designs.
The summary of this section of the paper is that giving patients better information about quality and prices have had very little success because . . .
Patients rarely use price- and quality-transparency tools
These sorts of decisions are complex
Patients fear disrupting their relationships with their physicians
Changing benefit designs to get patients to directly pay for more of their care (e.g., implementing high deductibles) has had a larger effect on utilization, but it hasn’t significantly impacted the market because . . .
What tends to happen is higher-value and lower-value care both decrease
Not enough patients end up getting steered toward higher-value providers to actually impact market prices.
He provides his explanation for all these failures: “The core problem is that for markets to work, patients must face the economic consequences of their choices, but labor-market concerns dampen employers’ enthusiasm for adopting plans that impose such consequences.”
In the realm of getting patients to choose higher-value insurance plans, there’s been a little bit of headway with insurance exchanges, although there are many drawbacks to those, too . . .
Beneficiaries make poor plan choices
Insurance exchanges induce more price sensitivity, which leads people to choose lower-premium plans that impose greater financial risk on them, which they often cannot bear
And, to make things worse, many of the downsides of insurance exchanges can worsen inequity.
Dr. Chernew is not exactly giving a glowing review of market-based reform attempts, is he? His comments are all accurate though.
Next, though, he says that “in evaluating their merits, we need to compare them with other systems, such as government-run models.” And government-run models have their own set of limitations.
Luckily, we are not facing an either-or decision. The important question is how government and markets can complement one another. “We do not need to abandon markets–we can make them better.”
Finally, getting to his recommendations about how to use markets and government to complement each other, he says we could work to increase the effectiveness of transparency initiatives, limit provider consolidation, and impose gentle regulations to prevent the most severe market failures (like limits on surprise billing and instituting price caps on the most excessive prices).
Dr. Chernew’s conclusion is that, “If we fail to improve market functioning, stronger government involvement will most likely be needed.” Agreed.
This is the second last paper in the NEJM series, and I think they’ve done a great job covering the major topics so far to give the “lay of the land” of this incredibly exciting field.
This one, written by Matthew Fiedler, Ph.D., gives an overview of the different camps that are vying for their respective visions of how to reform the healthcare system. And I’ll start by giving a quick summary of all his main points, then I’ll discuss some issues I have with this paper after that.
He first defines the main big-picture policy issues that are being debated by the two competing groups (essentially Republicans and Democrats, although he doesn’t refer to the groups by those names): What role should government play in ensuring broad health insurance coverage? And, How should we cope with the lack of competition in many health care provider markets?
Then Dr. Fiedler explains that the two groups disagree about which problem should be solved first. There’s the group that advocates first for universal coverage, which is because their beliefs are that health insurance substantially improves health and financial security, and that the well-being of lower-income people is particularly important, and that governments should have broad latitude to intervene in the health care system. And the other group, he explains, disagrees, and they instead believe that federal coverage programs, particularly those serving lower-income people, are too expansive.
He then talks more about the first group, explaining that there is actually a division between those who want to expand on the ACA-type approach of keeping the patchwork of coverage and those who want to replace the coverage patchwork with a single integrated coverage program. The second option would be simpler and impose smaller administrative and hassle costs, but it would require higher taxes and greater disruption to existing coverage arrangements.
Circling back to the group that feels that programs that serve lower-income people are too expansive, Dr. Fiedler says that their plan is to repeal things and take away subsidies for helping individuals obtain coverage. That’s why the CBO concluded that their approach would increase the uninsured by more than 20 million (but would also substantially reduce federal spending).
As for the second issue that he defined at the beginning of his paper–that of dysfunctional health care competition–he seems to attribute it to concentrated health care markets (for example, 90% of hospital markets meet the threshold for being highly concentrated), and then he explains the implications of that and approaches to addressing it.
The implications of concentrated markets are, as he explains, that it allows providers to demand high prices from private insurers, which increases the cost of insurance. It may also encourage providers to operate inefficiently and can even reduce providers’ pressure to improve quality because patients’ ability to switch providers is limited.
One approach to addressing this issue is a combination of several efforts, such as strengthening anti-trust enforcement, eliminating other policies that weaken competition (such as certificate-of-need requirements, which limit market entry, and “any willing provider” requirements, which keep insurers from offering providers increased volume in exchange for lower prices), and enhancing price transparency. About price transparency, he says it is pursued in hopes of encouraging patients to seek out lower-priced providers and encouraging providers to price more competitively, “although prior experience with price transparency is uneven.”
Limitations of this competition-enhancing collection of policies are that enhancing antitrust enforcement is too late in already-concentrated markets, and even if the other efforts help, robust competition may not be realistic (or even desirable) in some smaller markets anyway given the fixed costs associated with operating another hospital or physician practice.
Dr. Fiedler then discusses the other approach to addressing non-competitive healthcare markets and their high prices, which is to turn to administrative pricing. This could include price caps, and it could also include a “public option,” which would be a new publicly run insurance plan that would compete alongside private plans, thereby keeping private insurers honest in their premiums. He gives the downsides of these policies, especially that they may decrease providers’ incentives to improve quality because they prevent providers from parlaying investments in quality into higher prices or lucrative new volume, but then he acknowledges that the magnitude of this effect is uncertain.
That pretty much summarizes his main points. On the upside, I think he did a good job approaching the topic in an organized fashion. On the downside, I think this paper was incredibly (yet subtly) biased, which is totally inappropriate for a series of articles that is ostensibly providing a neutral introduction to health policy. This does NOT mean I’m accusing Dr. Fiedler of trying to trick people–I think this paper is simply an accurate reflection of his political influences and his understanding of these health policy topics. The fact that the NEJM editors did not make him change many of these things before publishing this paper is probably a reflection of their political persuasions as well.
This post is already long enough, but I’ll try to succinctly point out some of my main issues.
First, framing the two problems as a coverage issue and a “competition” issue. The second one is not just about healthcare competition. It’s about reigning in healthcare spending, which, if it continues on its current trend, will be the primary cause of bankrupting our country. His narrow focus on competition minimizes the problem, which then undermines the legitimacy of the group that wants to focus on that problem first rather than focus on the coverage issue first. He would have done well to at least parrot conservatives’ statements about not wanting to put even more people into an already unsustainable healthcare system and push us even faster toward bankruptcy but instead to get the costs down first, which would have the side-benefit of pricing many of the uninsured into the system as well.
Next, he describes liberals’ beliefs about the benefits of insurance and their interest in getting coverage for the poor, and then his description of conservatives’ beliefs and priorities is . . . nonexistent, other than to say that they “disagree” and then list all the things they want to take away without providing any rationale for why this might also be a reasonable approach (depending on your core values and priorities). It’s a subtle marginalization of the other side and, unfortunately, reflects all too well our current intolerant political atmosphere.
Another concern, which I’ll make my final concern, is how he makes a show of providing the downsides of his favoured policies but then immediately minimizes them as if to say the downsides are minor, and, conversely, how he describes much more persuasively the downsides of his unfavoured policies without any minimization. A good example of this is his entire discussion about the two different approaches to addressing non-competitive healthcare markets. I’ll spare you long quotations; go read directly from the paper if you have access, starting at the last paragraph of the second page of the article.
I realize Dr. Fiedler did not have room in that article for a thorough analysis of the huge and multifaceted issues he was introducing, so I hope one day to meet him and discuss some of these topics with him. Until then, for anyone interested in a few more details on these topics, here are some links to material I’ve written on these topics before . . .
For how market consolidation fits into our overall spending issues, see here. For a more complete discussion on price transparency, see here and here. For the potential harms and potential benefits of administrative pricing, see here. For some discussion on public options, see here. And for a thorough evaluation of Medicare for All versus other options, see here and here and here and here.
Clear Thinking on Healthcare 