The Administration's Health Care Plan--Posner

It is understandable why there is widespread concern with the American system of health care. The nation spends about 15 percent of its very large Gross Domestic Product on health care, which is almost twice as much per capita as the nations that we consider our peers spend, yet outcomes, at least as measured by longevity, are no better in the United States than in those other nations, or for that matter in many much less wealthy nations. We provide much greater health care to elderly people at the end of their life than other nations do, though without much to show for it in increased longevity. Some 45 million people--15 percent of the population--have no health insurance, either private or public. They are either charity patients, or pay the full price of any medical treatment they receive--or at least are charged the full price, for a common sequel to an expensive medical procedure for an uninsured patient is the patient's declaring bankruptcy in order to wipe out his medical debt. The Administration wants every American to have medical insurance. The details are unclear, but the thrust of the Administration's plan is those who can afford to buy medical insurance, either directly or through their employer, would be required to do so and that those who cannot would have their insurance subsidized. The cost to the government alone of the Administration's program is estimated by the Administration itself to be $120 billion a year. How it will be financed remains up in the air, along with many other crucial details. Probably part of the cost will be defrayed by limiting the tax deductibiliy of employer-provided health insurance. But most of it, at least in the short run, will simply be added to the government's huge budget deficit--so huge that amounts like $120 billion are beginning to seem like small change. The Administration claims that in the long run the aggregate cost of health care will actually fall. Indeed, the hope is that the $120 billion annual cost will not have to be funded at all, but instead will be offset by various reforms that the Administration proposes, including digitization of health records, allocation of greater resources to preventive care, and evaluating the performance of hospitals and other medical providers more carefully, to determine which medical procedures are really useful, and limiting reimbursement to providers accordingly. I don't think the program makes fiscal sense. If enacted in anything like the form that the Administration is urging on Congress, it would be immensely costly and would thus add significantly to our national debt, which is already growing at a fast clip because of the decline of tax revenues as a result of the current depression and the immense government expenditures on trying to speed economic recovery. Ignored in estimates of the cost of the health care program is the effect of insurance on the demand for medical services. When people, because they lack health insurance, have to pay for medical services or encounter long queues in hospital emergency rooms, they have an incentive to economize on medical treatment. If they have health insurance, the marginal cost of treatment in excellent medical facilities falls to the cost of a deductible or copayment; and it is the marginal cost that the insured consumer of medical services confronts--the cost of the health insurance premium itself is a fixed cost, which is not affected by how much treatment the insured receives. Because the supply of medical services is not highly elastic, an increase in the demand for those services will increase average as well as total cost. I would not object if a program of universal health insurance could be financed by reducing or eliminating the tax deductibility of health insurance. But only a modest reduction, if that, in its deductibility is politically feasible. The reforms that the Administration contends will not only pay for the program but also reduce the aggregate costs of health care in the United States are probably pie in the sky. Digitization of medical records does increase efficiency: it makes it easier to change doctors, track health histories, and coordinate medical services. But the net savings are likely to be modest or even negative, because anything that lowers the average cost of a given quality of health care increases demand, just as broadening insurance coverage does. Preventive care--another efficiency measure touted by health-care reformers--is potentially very costly, because by definition it provides health services to people who are not yet ill. Advances in preventive care are not limited to telling people to exercise and eat healthful foods, but increasingly are dominated by massive and costly programs of screening and follow-up. Such programs, and the treatments that ensue for persons found to have a treatable condition, may extend life, but often this means keeping alive very sick people who will require expensive care for the remainder of their prolonged life. An effort to create a form of benchmark competition between hospitals and between doctors, by careful evaluation of outcomes and by using the results of the evaluation to calibrate reimbursement by insurers so that the best-performing health-care providers will be rewarded and the worst punished, is likely to founder on the difficulty of adjusting for differences in outcomes that are not attributable to the efficiency of the health-care provider. In addition, efforts to limit treatment by limiting reimbursement, especially efforts by government to do so, are deeply unpalatable both to patients and to doctors and hospitals. A patient convinced by his doctor that a particular treatment is his only hope for continued life will not be reassured to be told that in the opinion of the government's experts, the treatment would not be cost-justified because it is very costly and is unlikely to be successful. Insurers, and employer health-benefits plans, try to do this kind of financial triage now, but their lack of success is reflected in the enormous annual cost of American health care. A deep problem is the replacement, in the medical profession as in the legal profession, of a professional model of service with a business model. In the professional model, the service provider is assured a good but not extravagant income by limitations on competition, and in exchange he is expected to avoid exploiting the ignorance of patients as he could do by performing unnecessary or low-value procedures. In the business model, the service provider endeavors to maximize his net revenues. In the case of medicine, the disparity of knowledge between provider and patient, coupled with the fear and desperation that serious illness (or just the possibility of it) engenders, enables the profit-maximizing provider often to convince the patient to undergo costly low-value treatments. Certainly the profit-maximizing health-care provider will be very relucant to refuse to provide a treatment that the patient insists upon, his insistence being made convincing by the fact that insurance will pay all or most of the cost. Insurers do try to limit their costs by refusing to approve low-value procedures--but in the face of combined pressure by provider and patient, the insurer is often forced to back down. To return to the initial puzzle of why our peer nations are able to provide what seems, judging by outcomes, a level of health equal or superior to that of Americans at far lower cost, the only convincing answer is that the health-care providers in those nations limit treatment. I am not sure of the explanation, but the possibilities include: the professional model is more tenacious in societies less committed to free markets and a commercial culture than the United States; more of their hospitals are public and more of their doctors are public employees, who are therefore salaried rather than entrepreneurial; and Americans, being less fatalistic than most other peoples, have a more intense demand for life-extending procedures. These are reasons why a national health plan modeled, as the Administration's appears to be, on the health plans of peer nations with much lower aggregate health costs is unlikely to work well, or at least to generate net cost savings. Of course if people value extension of life very highly--and there is evidence that, in the United States at least, most people do--a very costly health care system may be cost-justified, in the sense that the benefits exceed the costs. Yet the benefits seem rather illusory, since the extra money we spend on health care does not seem to produce better outcomes. But international comparisons of health that are limited as they largely are to differences in longevity are crude. They ignore health benefits unrelated to longevity, such as the benefits conferred by cosmetic surgery and the possibility that the additional costs of health care in the United States enable people to live more dangerous, strenuous, or self-indulgent lives and by doing so confer utility.

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