NEJM’s Fundamentals of U.S. Health Policy, Part 7b: My Commentary on Creating a More Efficient Delivery System

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-reducing innovation 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!