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.
Next week, I’ll give my thoughts on all this!
Clear Thinking on Healthcare 