In the face of this avalanche of misinformation and misguided solutions — let’s keep and improve the best medical care in the world with the correct free market incentives
Tortured Data Making Health Care Reform Much Harder
This is the third of a three-part series.In Part 2 of this series, we debunked propaganda, erroneous claims and phony statistics cited by obfuscating socialized medicine proponents to tar the U.S. health care system. We now will continue to debunk misinformation and describe how government interference in the medical marketplace has contributed to, and in certain instances even created, the problems we are experiencing today.
Yet, Democrats and proponents of socialized medicine insist more government is needed and single payer is the ultimate solution – and they use factoids, misinformation, phony claims and misleading statistics in that effort.
When it comes to health statistics, one must ascertain whether the data has been tortured until it confessed. The U.S. public health establishment has become so politicized that figures and statistics must be checked and double-checked, especially when it concerns social and economic impact of health care policy. And make no mistake, more than ideology plays a role. The allocation of public funds for programs or research, so intertwined with financial self-interest, also is a major consideration for these “public servant” health officials.
Returning to criticism of the U.S. health care system, an article by an American economics professor stated, “Administrative complexity and waste are no accident but rather are baked into our private health insurance system and made worse by continuing attempts to use competitive market processes to achieve social ends other than maximizing profit.”
But complexity and bureaucracy are “baked into” U.S. private health insurance not because market forces are at work but precisely the opposite. Health care is probably the most extensively government-regulated industry in the U.S.
The solution offered by this professor is, predictably, the adoption of the government as the single payer. Why would the government do a better job with the health care industry than it has done with every other business, industry or profession, other than defense, it has entered … all with disastrous consequences?
Another article by CBS News states: “Medical care prices increased 4 percent in 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and premiums under Obamacare’s second-lowest costing “silver” plans rose 7.5 percent in 2015. Plus, the U.S. spends far more per capita on health care — $9,892 in 2016 — than any other nation.” All this is true, and the article correctly cites some of the reasons why medical care is expensive. Unfortunately, the first factor listed, “high administrative costs” fails to identify the real culprit. Instead, like the previous piece, the CBS article blames high administrative costs on the “U.S. having so many payers — from a slew of private health insurance companies to government programs — that physicians have to negotiate with in the regular course of business.”
High administrative costs are the result of government-imposed regulations, such as waiting on the phone for authorization for medical testing and procedures, approval for hospitalizations, hospital days, etc., and the billing clerks and bureaucracy this rigmarole demands.
These regulations begin with Medicare and Medicaid to reduce costs, paradoxically, and soon enough find themselves in the business of “private insurance.” Thus, bureaucracy and complexity in the third party payer system is directly or indirectly related to government involvement.
A “slew of private health insurance companies” is good for the public. It does not increase complexity as claimed, because free-market competition and choice in insurance plans, if unfettered by government, would increase consumer choice and reduce costs,
Other pernicious causes of the high cost of medical care are the practice of defensive medicine and the high price of technology. The first has been an insoluble problem because the U.S. has more preying lawyers than any other “industrialized nation,” and in litigious America, fishing expeditions and ambulance chasing sadly have become too common.
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Trial lawyer advertising in the quest of fomenting an adversarial society, instead of a harmonious one, is another fact of life. Defensive medicine to protect from medical lawsuits, consequently, will persist, until vigorous tort reform is implemented. High technology will result in high costs because we are at the cutting edge of advances, and research and development is expensive.
The aforementioned article identifies the problems, but then as if on cue — like some of the other phony claims and leftist rhetoric that we have encountered — calls for socialized medicine. It’s the only way to bring down costs, they say, because “When countries cover everybody, they then turn to saving money.”
Which is exactly the problem. The only way socialized medicine saves money is by rationing care. It does so by queues and waiting lists, restrictions to see specialists, limits access to life-saving medical treatments, cutting back approved services, and even outright denial of services to the most vulnerable in society, those deemed to have incurable illnesses too expensive for the government to allocate resources to, and the elderly, after they reach a certain age.
Only in passing does the article make the subtle-but-astounding admission that some officials recognize the real problem of high medical care costs and are trying to break through the bureaucratic haze to provide real free market solutions:
“A few providers in the U.S. and abroad are experimenting with a more direct approach to patients paying for primary care, in which patients pay a monthly fee to the office as they would pay a premium, then pay directly for visits and procedures.” But there the suggestion stops and no effort is made to pursue the thought to its logical conclusion and allow the invisible hand of the free market to function unhindered.
Government is the problem. Reforms are needed but in a completely different direction. We have traveled in the wrong direction for the last several decades — that is, more and more government intervention, which has worsened the situation that liberals created in the first place and now decry. We need instead more free market incentives and deregulation, and the removal of the monopolistic protection that the government has extended to the big insurance carriers. With these reforms, the health insurance industry would be subject to more competition and less government protection, improving access and facilitating coverage by making insurance more affordable.
Lack of competition is the major reason, for example, that Health Savings Accounts have not been expanded in many states, remain a very limited option, and truly affordable catastrophic health insurance has not been made available.
Admittedly, there are problems in the health care system, which need addressing. Both medical care delivery and prescription drugs are too expensive. If costs and bureaucratic red tape could be reduced, the number of the uninsured would further decrease without the need for government compulsion and penalties. Likewise, pharmaceutical competition would bring down the price of prescription drugs. So it’s worth repeating, the underlying cause of dissatisfaction is not that we need more government involvement, but that we need more competition and more free market incentives.
Since third-party payers — whether private insurance or government programs — foot most medical bills, doctors and patients do not even discuss fees for elective medical and surgical procedures. The perception (and reality) is that someone else pays the bill, so that both patient and doctor are reluctant to discuss fees, even though 96 percent of medical encounters are routine and do not require emergency care.
Recently, I had the opportunity to see just how much the invisible hand of the free market has been constrained by the direction we have taken in fee-for-service medical care. We asked the surgeon who was going to perform an elective procedure on my wife what his fee was. He said he didn’t know, that we needed to ask someone in the business office. Later, he admitted that some dentists and cosmetic plastic surgeons had a competitive and better system because patients pay for their own health care in those settings.
The point is that to bring prices down in health care, as in every other consumer transaction, fees and prices must be discussed to bring about competition. We have found other physicians to be more price-conscious and happy to help their patients obtain competitively priced and equally effective medications, even from other countries.
But because of the perversions of the free market that have been created by government interference, progressive theoreticians want to overhaul the entire system and throw the baby out with the bath water. Another writer, for example, identified the problem with the U.S. health care system, as not having enough free market incentives (which is true) as well as being a “medical monopoly” (which is not true) — and then proposes the contradictory and completely wrong remedy: the government as the single payer. Go figure!
In the face of this avalanche of misinformation and misguided solutions — let’s keep and improve the best medical care in the world with the correct free market incentives.
Miguel A. Faria, M.D. is a retired clinical professor of neurosurgery and long time medical editor. He is the author of Vandals at the Gates of Medicine (1995); Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine (1997); and Cuba in Revolution — Escape From a Lost Paradise (2002). His website is http://www.haciendapub.com
