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Get at the root causes
The Anthem decisions, first to raise health insurance plan prices by 38 percent in California, then to pull back on some of the price increases, tell us nothing about the root causes of why the prices needed to be raised in the first place. Ultimately, the root causes of runaway health insurance costs are a combination of declining health, as reflected in an explosive growth of chronic diseases, broken reimbursement systems that encourage health care providers to get paid more for activity than for results, and state laws that add requirements to every insurance policy and process that add cost, but often without adding public value.
Insurance companies make profits; if they did not, they would not stay in business. They also need to allocate some revenues to improving their technologies, processes, and health plan outreach, over and above what they pay health care institutions on behalf of their policyholders. However, even if you stripped all of their profits, health insurance would only become marginally less unaffordable because the culprit is not the profits of the insurance industry. In fact, there is no single culprit. When a society spends $2.5 trillion on health care and gets the mediocre results we have gotten, many people and institutions are making money that are not improving health or health care. Moreover, many people have health care industry jobs that, in a society that properly allocated its resources, would be working in another industry.
Health and health care reform need to start at root causes, and then, over time, the insurance cost and access problem will go away. If we continue to tackle the insurance problems and do not get at root causes, that would be like Toyota continually paying for brake and accelerator replacements without getting at why brakes and accelerators are failing.
By
Michael Critelli
|
February 18, 2010; 3:41 PM ET
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Posted by: bwcolq | February 21, 2010 10:06 AM
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We need a least a small sampling to get a good guess at the percentages of each suspected cause. If the math people that figure stock insurance could work at that they would do a service. Health costs are enormous compared to industries of like skills. This tort issue: The half percent said by the CBO is the provider's premium savings passed on if a a 500k cap were put on tort settlements, what it misses is the enormous detrimental effect of costly over-treatment satisfying, often dictated by the malpractice insurer to minimize suits alltogether--added treatments not the prescriber's or insurer's cost but the patient's. An over scrutinized work force exits today and we pay on that. Also, it is dumb when the provider has to do addendum-like additions in treatment as if they were the lawyer, and not functioning quite right as the doctor. Like what if we have new software for the car, when the accelerator sticks, make it turn in circles, shift from forward to reverse every 2 seconds and then give warning to "check engine." If you didn't check engine than it's not their fault.