I stumbled across the web site healthpolitics.com recently while looking for Jeanne Scott’s site health-politics.com (you spot the cunning difference!). HealthPolitics with Dr. Magee is a site which does a weekly power-point, talking head (literally!) and transcript presentation. It’s neatly done and when you find out the Dr. Magee is head of Pfizer’s Medical Humanities Initiative you understand that they have the bucks to make it so. I’ve seen a few of the webcasts, they are less than 10 minutes long.  Normally these webcasts are about extremely specific patient-physician issues, so the "healthpolitics" title is a bit of a misnomer.

This week, however, the program is about care for the uninsured. Worth watching; it runs about 8 minutes but you can click ahead and read the transcript and slides in about 3. Magee draws heavily on the Kaiser Family Fund backed study by Jack Hadley and John Holohan in Health Affairs that shows that government picked up $35bn of the tab for caring for the uninsured already. Magee ‘s solution is take to those funds and several other sources including cash paid out of pocket from by the uninsured and use it to give the uninsured health insurance.  Magee does not mention the follow up study by the same authors which showed that the uninsured would use "$33.9-68.7 billion (in 2001 dollars) in additional medical care if they were fully insured". In other words covering the uninsured with health insurance by using the current government funding would require extra money, but it would still be considerably less than, say, the $87bn going you know where this year.

Of course Pfizer (and its fellow pharmas and private insurers) are not going to be in favor of a comprehensive national health insurance policy.  However, because they have shown considerable ability to derail health reform in the past, any reform proposal needs to consider their position to be realistic. We are now in a situation where PhRMA, the big pharma trade group, has put its backing behind Medicare Drug Coverage, even though in the long run this will probably mean price controls over their products. Magee’s view seems to show that big pharma is willing to work on ways to get to insurance for the uninsured (who after all then would have more access to their products). Meanwhile the lefty Foundations like KFF believe that there’s less than $50bn required to get to comprehensive insurance for the uninsured, much of which could be recouped from the uninsured themselves (80% of whom, don’t forget, are working and who are already paying over $25bn out of pocket for care). This means that there is potentially less than $20-30 billion required out in new government funding to solve the whole deal.

Is this likely to happen?  Obviously not soon, and extremely unlikely unless we see a "regime change" next November. But given the fairly formless proposals offered by the Democratic candidates so far, this type of minimalist practical approach may make sense by February 2005.