Tag Archives: health insurance

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.

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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 →

Ted Cruz got Obamacare right—massive transfers from the healthy; His contempt shows Republicans’ health care bind

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Last week’s CPAC conference’s discussion of health care was dominated by (yet more) calls for Obamacare’s repeal, along with preeminent mocker, Sarah Palin’s memorable “I do not like this Uncle Sam. I do not like his health care scam.” More measured Republicans worried that CPAC offered no constructive health care suggestions and ignored the new Republican alternative to Obamacare.

No one seems to have noticed that Ted Cruz fairly accurately characterized Obamacare as “a massive wealth transfer from young healthy people to everyone else.”  That’s a pity. That sentence and Cruz’s contempt for such transfers are revealing. They show that Republican rhetoric conflicts with the economics of health insurance, in particular with the fact that only government interfering in the market can solve our health insurance problems. Republicans can only produce good health care policy when they build it on a base of reality.

Here is the economic reality that Cruz misses: health insurance consists of transfers from the healthy to the sick. It’s just like fire insurance. Everyone pays premiums. Those who have fires get massive transfers of wealth, paid for by those who don’t have fires. All insurance is about transfers from the lucky to the unlucky.

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Single Payer Wouldn’t Be Simple Either: A Fractal Story

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“A two-page bill could have extended Medicare and provided universal coverage,” writes Franklin Foer in The New Republic, contrasting Progressives’ preferred single-payer system with modern liberals’ 20,202 page Obamacare legislation. Unfortunately, it’s not true.

Here is one of a zillion reasons why. Say that Grandma Mildred goes to the hospital with pneumonia. Medicare will pay the hospital based on her Diagnostic Related Group (DRG): one fixed payment for Grandma’s stay based on her diagnosis of pneumonia, no matter how long or short her stay, no matter how many tests she gets. This is so the hospital won’t give Grandma an extra X-ray to collect more taxpayer money.

Okay. So why not just extend that payment system to the under-65s? The problem is figuring out how much the DRG payment should be for them. Right now, MedPAC figures out how much to pay for each DRG, using cost and care data for Medicare (over-65 or disabled) patients they have been collecting for years. They would need the same data (and much analysis) for the under-65s for the expansion. And we would need to decide whether DRG payments vary by age and if so, how.  Continue reading →

Republicans for Government Subsidized Insurance

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Congressman Steven Palazzo, Republican of Mississippi, has proposed an amendment supporting Federal government subsidies to insurance: “We have one common goal—to make sure that insurance remains available and affordable to everyone.”

No, the ardent Obamacare opponent has not been bewitched by a Democratic spell. I left out of his statement one key word: “flood.” It is flood insurance that Palazzo considers essential and worthy of government subsidies, not health insurance. In fact, he finds it so essential that neither likely-to-balloon expenditures nor damaging distortions to insurance and real estate markets dissuade him.

Flood insurance subsidies are now being reduced—sharp premium increases began on Oct. 1. Palazzo’s and other Republicans’ opposition shows that they are not the anti-government ideologues they claim—and perhaps aspire—to be. And if they only cared to look, their support for flood insurance could provide a window of understanding into the reasons for Obamacare. Continue reading →