Lawton Burns and Mark Pauly, economists at the Wharton School, just published an article that should be required reading for all policy makers and health services researchers. The article, entitled “Transformation of the health care industry: Curb your enthusiasm,” appears in the latest edition of the Milbank Quarterly.
Burns and Pauly undertook an enormous task and executed it well. They first sought to explain the assumptions underlying Managed Care (MC) 2.0 – the proposals promoted by the managed care movement in the wake of the HMO backlash of the late 1990s. Then they evaluated the probability that the MC 2.0 proposals will work as advertised. To do that, they looked at the relevant research and then at the social conditions that are impeding the implementation of those proposals. That’s a lot to bite off.
This is an unusually valuable article because of its scope, organization, and documentation. I will summarize it first, then discuss it in more detail. I’ll close with a discussion of my one serious criticism of this excellent paper: The authors, having made it clear they think the current “value-based” approach to cost containment is doomed, profess to see no solutions to rising health care costs.
Testing a mantra
Burns and Pauly are among the small minority of health services researchers who seem to be curious about the powerful norms that influence their profession but which are rarely acknowledged and never studied. They do not come right out and say, “Our profession resembles a religion more than a scientific discipline,” but you get the feeling they might agree with that statement if you could talk to them over coffee. They communicate their interest in the undiscussed norms both in the way they treat health policy jargon (they view it with some skepticism) and in their willingness to declare that fundamental assumptions underlying MC 2.0 were never tested.
If it weren’t for the round, scaly patch on the young woman’s shoulder, her doctor might never have known that she served in the Navy for 6 years. He wouldn’t have learned about her sun exposure during a year-long station in east Africa, where temperatures regularly reached over 100°F. But because he didn’t ask about her military history, he didn’t hear about the burn pits and dust storms that filled her lungs with toxic particles. He didn’t hear about the infectious diseases to which she was exposed. He didn’t hear about whether or not she was exposed to combat, or if she experienced military sexual trauma. Perhaps if she were an older man with fading tattoos and a Marine Corps baseball cap, he might have thought to ask.
