Tag Archives: health care costs

Avik Roy on Health Care: Faith in Markets, Prejudice Against Government Hurt Otherwise Good Proposal

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Avik Roy is on to something with his call to conservatives: focus on health care costs. The Affordable Care Act isn’t really about controlling costs and has just thrown in a grab bag of miscellaneous stuff to address it. (Some of those ACA bits and pieces may be working, though.) But Roy’s supposed evidence for the cost control of “market oriented systems” left me confused: Copy Switzerland, because its “results are remarkable.”

Huh?

The last time I checked, Switzerland was way up there on the health care expenditure charts. Nowhere close to the US but above most everyone else. In fact, Switzerland, with its ‘more private than most countries’ health care system fits a pattern. Empirically, tight government control systems (like the UK’s) are cheapest—not a result that fits neatly into Roy’s belief system. Continue reading →

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Never-Ending Health Care Crisis, Part 2: Struggling to Pay for Stuff That’s Worth It—and a Possible Reprieve

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Ross Douthat predicted that we are in for a never-ending health care crisis. He’s right, partly because health care is paid for by health insurance, which means spending other people’s money, as I said in Part 1.

But another factor drives the endless health care cost crisis even more: ever new and better medical technology—and the ever-increasing amounts we must find to pay for it. Those who follow health care policy (like Douthat) understand this. But to help inoculate the public against health care policy snake oil salesmen, everyone needs to understand it. To make things more complicated, but possibly a bit better, the US might, just might, get reprieve from the endless cost-growth.

Continue reading →

Douthat is Right, Health Care Debate Will Never End, But He Misdiagnoses Some Underlying Causes, Part 1: Other People’s Money

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Ross Douthat predicts that despite Obamacare’s comeback from Healthcare.gov’s disastrous rollout, its failure to unravel and the failure of Republicans to repeal it, health care debate will never end: “What we should expect for years, decades, a generation: a grinding, exhausting argument over how to pay for healthcare.“ Health care policy experts tweeted their agreement.

Douthat is totally right that this debate will never end. And all his facts and analyses are correct too. But he mistakes “a society that’s growing older, consuming more care, and (especially if current secularizing trends persist) becoming more and more invested in postponing death,” a relatively small effect, for a big one. It’s not aging that is the big driver of health care spending growth but new and improved health care technologies driving up costs per person.

More importantly, Douthat fails to identify the underlying, inescapable reasons that, like the proverbial poor, a health care crisis will always be with us. Thus he fails to distinguish problems we can (eventually) avoid from those we can’t. And he conflates causes that affect all rich countries with those specific to the US. To avoid over-reacting to Obamacare’s problems and rushing into the arms of a snake-oil salesman promising the unobtainable…. to spot the Obamacare reforms which will help, we need to understand the reasons and distinguish the cases.

To help you do that, I offer, over four blog posts, a guide to why no rich country can avoid permanent health care crisis and why it is so hard to fix the US-only problems. Continue reading →

You can’t have it both ways: Taking from the rich to buy health care

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Three and a half years after Obamacare passed, three weeks before the Exchanges go live, and coinciding with their 42nd attempt to destroy the law, House Republicans have an official alternative to Obamacare. In fact, Republican Congressman Tom Price, already had a proposal. But a key change from that proposal—eliminating tax credits in favor of only tax deductions—is revealing. It shows that House Republicans are unwilling to take from the rich and therefore unwilling to ensure that all Americans get modern healthcare.

Our biggest problems with health insurance come from something really good—the great stuff health care can do. Continue reading →