Would Single-Payer Even Pencil Out In The U.S.?
On Vox, the vivacious new topical news site, staffed in part by former writers at the Washington Post Wonk Blog, Sarah Kliff writes how Donald Berwick, M.D., the recent former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the founder of the prestigious Institute for Healthcare Improvement, has concluded that a single payer health system would answer many of the nation's healthcare woes.
Dr. Berwick is running for Governor of Massachusetts and this is an important plank of his platform. Of course, it is easy to show that single payer systems in other developed nations provide comparable or better quality care at about half the cost that we do in the US.
All else being equal, I might be inclined to agree with Dr. Berwick’s assessment. But the U.S. is special in two ways that make a single payer system unlikely to produce anything but even higher healthcare costs than we already have.
First, it is very clear that the healthcare industry dominates our regulatory environment, so that nearlyevery law and rule is spun to the special rather than the common interest. In 2009, the year the ACA was formulated, health care organizations deployed eight lobbyists for every member of Congress, and contributed an unprecedented $1.2 billion in campaign contributions in exchange for influence over the shape of the law.
This is largely why, while it sets out the path to some important goals, the ACA is so flawed.
Understood in terms of its probable returns on a nearly $3 trillion current annual health care spend over, say, 25 years. the lobbying investment was a drop in a very large bucket. The negligible opportunity cost will generate returns for the industry for many years to come.
Second, every health industry sector – brokers, health plans, physicians, health systems, drug and device firms, health IT firms – has demonstrated and continues to demonstrate a willingness to employ institutionalized mechanisms of excess, most of them variants on over-treatment and stratospheric unit pricing, that allow them to extract more money than they are entitled to.
This is why U.S. healthcare costs double what it does in other developed nations.
It’s not that our people are sicker, but that we now accept distorted care and cost as normal. These practices unnecessarily expose patients to physical peril and cost purchasers double, displacing spending on other critical needs. Unfortunately, ACA does little to disrupt this waste.
Admittedly, employers and unions have so far failed to galvanize and mobilize their aggregated purchasing strength to demand greater healthcare value. But in a system in which the regulatory environment has been captured by healthcare, purchasers remain our most promising counterweight to the health care industry’s unrelenting cost growth.
Imagine what might transpire if employers and unions were removed from the equation, except for their contribution through taxes. The purchase of health care coverage would move from groups, who have latent but considerable power, to individuals, who have little to no power against monolithic health care organizations.
In the curious dynamic that has evolved, only non-healthcare business and labor leaders could work collaboratively, serving as a counterweight to the healthcare industry’s excesses and holding their healthcare partners accountable. They could use their considerable purchasing leverage to reward organizations and professionals with good clinical and business practices and, frankly, punish those with bad ones.
But under single payer, we’d all be at the mercy of what occurs in the transactions between our congressional representatives and the health industry’s lobbyists. If the past is prologue, there would be little opposition, and the industry would have open field running.
Brian Klepper is the chief executive officer of the National Business Coalition on Health.
