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Tag: Health Affairs

Vermont’s Bold Experiment

• 26

By DAVID DRANOVE

I was delighted to see the lead article in Health Affairs describing Vermont’s new single payer health care financing system. Harvard Professor William Hsiao and his coauthors describe this as a “Bold Experiment” and I couldn’t agree more. It is also a very welcome experiment. For over thirty years I have heard the rhetoric that a single payer system would never work in the United States. For that matter, I have heard that a true market-based system (with vouchers) would never work either. Why not let the states experiment and find out what will and won’t work? Thankfully, the Vermont legislators and Governor Shumlin had the courage to take this leap of faith.

The biggest obstacle to implementation appears to be ERISA, which limits the extent to which states can regulate self-funded plans. Apparently, self-insured employers could object to having their tax payments used to support the plan. But Vermont can apply for an ERISA waiver under terms in the Affordable Care Act and the state hopes to begin its bold experiment in 2015.

As bold as the plan might be, Hsiao et al. might be even bolder in projecting the potential cost savings, which they peg at 25.3 percent. Academics rarely go out on a limb with projections like this that can easily be assessed in a few years time. And academics are rarely so optimistic. I wish I could share that optimism.Continue reading…

Hyperventilating about the Harvard/Health Affairs Malpractice Study

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By DAVID DRANOVE

A new study from an interdisciplinary team at Harvard University reports that the medical malpractice system costs close to $60 billion annually. The study is published in the policy journal Health Affairs and is receiving lots of attention in the media. The attention is unwarranted. The study is old news, of questionable validity, and prone to misinterpretation. But that hasn’t stopped the medical lobbying complex from hyperventilating about the findings and renewing its call for massive tort reform.

The study provides no surprises to anyone in the health research or health policy arena who pays attention to malpractice. All of the data are in the public domain and most have been reported in previous studies. (For the past decade I have reported essentially the same findings in my health economics class.)

The most important component of malpractice costs is defensive medicine. The Harvard authors put this at $46 billion, or nearly 80 percent of the total, but this is pure guesswork. Researchers cannot agree on the extent of defensive medicine. The Harvard authors base their estimates on seminal studies by Kessler and McClellan. Their work is seminal largely because it was first, not because it was definitive, and later studies often find far less evidence of defensive practice. The Harvard authors try to be conservative by using the low end of the Kessler/McClellan cost estimates. But truth would have been better served if they had stated that the cost of defensive medicine could just as easily be $16 billion or $76 billion.Continue reading…