I interviewed Grace-Marie Turner from Galen. Take a listen to the podcast (about 45 mins) (Unfortunately I’m very loud and she’s very quiet, so you’ll have to adjust the volume every time I come on! Also excuse the first few seconds of the call. She’d just met with Bush and was hoping to see herself on TV, and why not!)

By the end of the conversation I was way more confused about the CDHP movement than when I began. As far as I can tell she’s an advocate of managed care, disease management, and pre-paid care, and even perhaps even compulsory universal insurance. Or at least she appeared to be promoting the benefits of all those things.

It seems to me that just like Reggie, she grabbed any potential advance in health care and called it "consumerism", even if the organizations that do it best like Kaiser and the VA have no history  of HDHP and HDHP insurance products. In fact those products promote fee-for-service procedures beyond the deductible –exactly the opposite incentives that she suggested were necessary. I felt like I was listening to someone who’d read what was wrong in the Alain Enthoven manual and had no idea that the solutions she was proposing weren’t going to solve the problem.

I also spent a very long time trying to get her to explain if the healthy people are allowed to take their money out in the form of personal accounts where the extra money in the risk pool would come from to treat the sick people. (For more on this problem read down here). Unfortunately either I’m just too dumb to understand her explanation or there is no underwriting, no sick people, and no adverse selection in her world, or at least it’ll all washes out in time. And apparently no one would get a better deal in the individual market, if they could get a worse one via an association?

So I’m still awaiting the clear explanation I’ve been looking for about how this HDHP/CDHP movement is going to deal with the mathematical problems it causes and avoid destroying the risk pool. I read Cato’s book, the Hubbard one, now have talked to all kinds of HSA proponents, and not one has answered the question. I wonder why?

Still it was a fun conversation, even if I never got to the tough questions about where Galen’s money comes from  although Hillary Clinton knows!

Grace Marie will be out in SF at the CDHCC conference on May 8-10 in San Francisco