The latest edition of Health Wonk Review was hosted by Joe Paduda of Managed Care Matters. Fittingly, it touched on Republican efforts to repeal PPACA. Count Joe among those who are irked by the “Obamacare” moniker: “the President signed a bill that was sent him by the Senate; BaucusCare would be much more accurate.” Does this mean we get to refer to the “Bush tax cuts” as the Lott/Daschle tax cuts, and the “Clinton balanced budget” as the Gingrich balanced budget?
Paduda also weighed in on the debate regarding the CBO’s assessment of PPACA’s fiscal impact, arguing we should trust the CBO because “they’ve no axe to grind, unlike the pols.” (My take on the matter is somewhat less sanguine.)
Austin Frakt of the Incidental Economist is the left-of-center health wonk who is most engaged with right-of-center analysts. So I was surprised to see him approvingly cite this quotation from health economist Henry Aaron:
[T]he bill contains, at least in embryonic form, virtually every idea for cost control that any analyst has come up with…The most practical cost-control strategy that is now available to Congress is to accelerate the implementation of these provisions, not to stymie them.
This argument that “every idea for cost control that any analyst has come up with” was incorporated into PPACA is only true of you entirely exclude the right side of the spectrum. I can tick off a laundry list of cost-control strategies that weren’t included in the law: means-testing Medicare benefits; defined contribution reforms; indexing Medicare eligibility to life expectancy; serious tort reform; FEHBP-modeled reforms, etc. etc.
Furthermore, I and most other free-market-oriented health policy analysts argue that PPACA will increase costs by further subsidizing the overconsumption of health care. If you increase demand, while keeping supply constant, prices go up.
The opportunity for cost control that most excites center-to-left health wonks is PPACA-sanctioned accountable care organizations, or ACOs. Indeed, the January 2011 issue of Health Affairs is devoted to the topic. ACOs work by assembling a group of hospitals, doctors, and clinics who agree to be paid based on quality-driven measures, instead of simply on a fee-for-service basis. With this in mind, Jason Shafrin of Healthcare Economist has identified some legal barriers to ACO implementation that ACOs will need to seek waivers from.
Jeff Goldsmith of the Health Affairs Blog has an unconventional approach to Medicare’s “doc fix”; i.e., Sustainable Growth Rate, problem: “writing off the SGR ‘debt’ to the federal budget as ‘uncollectable’ and demanding both sacrifice and reform from the physician community in exchange.” The end result of the proposal put forth by the President’s deficit commission was somewhat similar: various Medicare and health spending cuts used to offset a long-term doc fix.
Rich Elmore of Healthcare Technology News links to a report from the International Federation of Health Plans that finds that the U.S. has the highest hospital and physician fees in the world. Could this mean that the “doc fix” doesn’t need to be fixed?
David Harlow of HealthBlawg has an interesting piece on an ongoing lawsuit to overturn one aspect of the Massachusetts individual mandate. The issues are quite different from those surrounding the PPACA mandate, as you can imagine.
The rest of this fortnight’s Health Wonk Review can be found here.
Right on target. Especially this:
"Furthermore, I and most other free-market-oriented health policy analysts argue that PPACA will increase costs by further subsidizing the overconsumption of health care. If you increase demand, while keeping supply constant, prices go up."
But even if the liberal wonks can't understand Econ 101, they can look at history. The best predictor is past performance. One can look at Romneycare and see the costs growing uncontrollably. And one must remember that half the costs of Romneycare state plane were federal dollars. Now a federal program doesn't have a big daddy to cushion the blow.
I would add adding to your list of policies not included in Obamacare is cross-state line insurance. I can buy car insurance from Connecticut, but there are lots of states where three or less companies controlling over 90% of market. (And you don't think those insurance companies are, under the table, colluding to keep costs up and competition down?)
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Rich Elmore of Healthcare Technology News links to a report from the International Federation of Health Plans that finds that the U.S. has the highest hospital and physician fees in the world."
I think what would be much more interesting would be to analyze the fees in conjunction with physician's median or average overhead costs in each country. It appears to me that it is nearly impossible for a physician to just hang up a shingle due to the complexity involved with chasing reimbursements around.
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