Most health care experts agree the reason our system is so
unaffordable is because of all of the waste and unnecessary care—up to
30% of what we spend.I will suggest that it will take the
genius of individual creativity to separate the 70% of this health care
system that is the best in the world from the 30% that is waste.So
far, the Congress has focused more on entitlement expansion then
fundamentally reforming the system and tackling the real
problem—getting all the excess costs out. The result so far is
expensive health care proposals and no real reform.How can we actually make the health care system affordable as we expand coverage? I will suggest a three-pronged attack:
Rantology: Cannon on Freedom or Power?
Ah-ha. Michael Cannon has now replied to me and it basically comes down in his mind to me being a crypto-fascist Stalinist wanting to break the will of the American people mediated through its representatives, the health care industry lobbyists. His piece is The Ultimate Question: Freedom or Power?
He closes by saying that I could only fix the health care system by getting rid of constitutional democracy. And Michael’s right.
More bad press for Insurers. Will anyone care?
Jon Cohn notes that Wendell Potter, a former PR executive with Cigna and Humana. will be appearing before a Senate Commerce Committee today. Note the word “former”.
Trudy Lieberman has an interview with Potter where he repeats what we already know:
Lieberman: How do companies manipulate the medical loss ratio?Potter: They look at expensive claims of workers in small businesses who are insured by the company, and the claims of people in the individual market. If an employer-customer has an employee or two who has a chronic illness or needs expensive care, the claims for the employee will likely trigger a review. Common industry practice is to increase premiums so high that when such accounts come up for renewal, the employer has no choice but to reduce benefits, shop for another carrier, or stop offering benefits entirely. More and more have opted for the last alternative.
The bleedingly obvious
It makes no sense for small businesses to provide health insurance to employees. This testimony from a small business owner to the House Tri-committee yesterday shows it. (Same is true for all employers but none save Ron Wyden dare say that).
Health insurance should be paid for by some form of taxation (VAT, income tax or payroll tax) that is in proportion to businesses and individuals profitability/income, and small businesses (and big ones) should be left to do whatever it is they do. I cannot fathom how NFIB manages to convince its members otherwise, but it does appear that there’s a crack in that dike with various small business groups coming out in support for real health reform.
Having said that, I don’t think there’s too much likelihood that a typical low wage business will get much help anytime soon.
A Dream of Reason
The dream of reason did not take power into account…Modern medicine is one of those extraordinary works of reason…But medicine is also a world of power.
-Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, 1984
Today’s unveiling of a Declaration of Health Data Rights is an important action, long overdue, that represents a collaborative effort by a group of health care professionals – activists, entrepreneurs, technologists and clinicians – all colleagues we hold in high esteem.
The Declaration’s several points arise from a single, simple premise: that patients own their own data, and that that ownership cannot be pre-empted by a professional or an institution. And there lies its power, especially in the context of early 21st Century health care. It is a transformative ideal that currently is not the norm. But we join our colleagues in declaring that it should be.Continue reading…
Your AHIP Quiz Question of the Day
By
This is something that’s been puzzling me for a few weeks. We all know that insurers are very good at making sure that they insure healthier risks than average. In the individual market they do this openly, by underwriting against poorer risks. Those “risks” (who are most of the people with the really tragic stories) end up uninsured or in massively over-stretched state major risk pools.
Obama vs Hillary at the AMA
By
Sixteen years and two days after then-First Lady and Health Care Czar Hillary Clinton went before the American Medical Association’s House of Delegates to sell her vision of national reform, President Barack Obama is treading the same path. I’m not sure how much greater eventual success Obama will have with the AMA, but having covered the Clinton speech as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, I have three lingering memories.
The first was the invocation given before Clinton arrived. Its gist was, “Oh, Lord, you have taught us it is impolite to boo our guests, particularly in front of hordes of reporters.” The second memory was that Clinton finished her speech to a standing ovation. And the third is that she spoke fluently and passionately for 50 minutes without a prepared text, much to the chagrin of a national press corps accustomed to being spoon-fed a follow-along text before filing their stories. Fortunately, being a mere “regional reporter” (as the White House called us), I had taken notes.
Obama’s visit promises at least a few contrasts. He runs virtually no risk of being booed. He’s not only the President of the United States, and a very popular one, he’s also a president who has eschewed the perceived doctor-bashing engaged in at times by President and Mrs. Clinton. Obama most assuredly will not be speaking from notes, being as attached to the teleprompter as Ronald Reagan was to his 3×5 cards, but in the Internet Age anyone who cares to will be able to hear him live, anyway. A standing ovation? We’ll have to see.
To the amazement of her audience in 1993, Hillary went out of her way to hit all their hot buttons. For example, she praised the doctor-patient relationship and lashed out at the “excessive oversight” of insurance company reviewers and government bureaucrats who second-guess medical decisions. She talked sympathetically of the need for reforming malpractice laws and amending antitrust laws to allow medical professional societies to discipline poor-quality doctors on their own. (Here, I’m relying on a copy of my story I grabbed from an electronic archive.)
Obama, by contrast, prides himself on seasoning the obligatory political pandering with a soupcon or two of hard, cold reality. While reducing red tape and the need for defensive medicine are sure to be high on his list of promises, I don’t think he’ll hesitate to invoke the harsh global economic challenges that make health care reform so urgent. Look for Obama to remind the doctors how many more uninsured patients they’re seeing today and how much more involved Medicare has become in setting doctor pay scales.
One more contrast: in 1993, the AMA shoved forward Nancy Dickey, the one woman on their nine-person executive committee, to be its public face during the Hillary visit. Today, the organization’s elected president is Nancy Nielsen, the second woman to head the group (Dickey went on to the top job) and, though not publicized, the first who came to the post after holding a senior position in one of those dread health plans.
David Gratzer is Nice. Dennis Kucinich is not.
I had David Gratzer on THCB a while back. He was so nice, that it was really hard for me to get mad with him—even though his book was basically a pack of lies. He seriously suggested that the UK under Blair was NHS was going to covert into an American-type system, and he couldn’t answer why he allowed his wife to come here and be uninsured! (Of course my father the gynecologist always told me that all psychiatrists are nuts anyway)
Then last week the single payer crowd finally got to appear before a Congressional committee, and for some bizarre reason Gratzer was there too (I guess he provided balance). And the very nice David Gratzer finds that Dennis Kucinich is not quite so nice. Watch this…
The Health Industry’s Achilles Heel
“You never want a serious
crisis to go to waste.”
Timing matters. The health industry has demonstrated steadfast
resistance to reforms, but its recently diminished fortunes offer the Obama
Administration an unprecedented opportunity to achieve meaningful change. The
stakes are high, though. The Administration’s health team must not miscalculate
the industry’s goals, or waver from goals that are in the nation’s interest.
The two are very different.
Aligning the forces of reform will be the first challenge. The White House and Congressional Democrats appear to be
collaborating to develop a unified reform design. Even so,
the effort is hardly pure. Lawmakers have been receptive to industry influence.
The non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics
reports that, in 2009, health care interests have already spent $128 million on
Congressional lobbying contributions, more than any other sector.
The tide now turned, most of that largess has gone to Democrats.
By the numbers, on single payer the Democrats are wussies
Now before I explain why I say the Democrats are girlie-men, let me say three quick things.
1. I am not a supporter of Medicare-for-all, or Canadian style, single-payer (or anything primarily based on fee-for-service payment) although they are both clearly superior to the American status quo. (I am in favor of real universal insurance, but that’s different and less limited than just single payer).
2. It’s still only 50–50 that we’ll get any reform this year, and what we will get will basically be an expansion of one of the worst-designed government programs—Medicaid—mixed with some very modest regulation of the worst behavior of the private insurance companies. And with the exemptions to the individual mandate and for small business at best we’ll get to around 95% coverage—and that’s not counting the undocumented immigrants, who are about another 3–5% of the population and who will still get care and thus still have to be paid for somehow. And the likely Kennedy/Baucus compromise plan has no sustainable insurance payment structure that I can see.
3. The data is a little murky and all sides kinda cheat with polling data (and bankruptcy data too).
But imagine for a moment that Dick Cheney & George W. Bush had 60 votes in the Senate, a disgraced opposition, and carte blanche to do what they liked because of a real national crisis (In other words a much better political situation than they faced in 2001 & 2003).
And imagine that there was a policy that their party’s supporters overwhelmingly favored. Do you think for a moment that they’d be looking for compromise even if what they were doing was egregiously and clearly wrong in both terms of public policy and fairness? For instance, cutting tax rates on dividends to less than half what poor suckers who work for a living have to pay, even though the benefits went largely to millionaires and billionaires. Or even worse eliminating estate taxes, when the benefits went only to millionaires and billionaires.
Actually we don’t have to imagine. We know what Cheney/Bush did. They passed the legislation they wanted, and damn the rest of us. And then did it with way less political clout than Obama has—Bush didn’t even win the election after all in the way most of us understand (err…by getting more votes than the other guy).
Now imagine that there’s a policy that polls show at least 35% and (depending who you believe) perhaps up to 60% of all Americans want, and that the same polls show that a vast majority of Democrats want it. And of course Obama’s political situation is way stronger than the Cheney Administration’s was.
In that situation and if they had a different political philosophy, wouldn’t the Cheney Administration just ram through single payer?
So by the numbers, in not even considering the single payer option (not even Kennedy’s plan comes close), the Democrats are proving themselves to be wussies.
CODA: I changed one letter in one word of this piece so that the humorless crowd in the comments didn’t detract from the real offensive stuff going on here–50 million un and under-insured with no political will to do anything serious about it. But if the comments don’t make sense, my original defense is in there too.
