As we're all painfully aware by now, Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to both expand health care in this country while making it more affordable.
But a quick glance at the pilot problem in Massachusetts shows—along with a little common mathematical sense—that you can't do both at the same time. There's clearly very little that's affordable in PPACA. We just haven't gotten all the bills yet.
(And, yeah, I know I've covered this before but I really didn't want to write about Rush Limbaugh, birth control or feigned moral outrage this week. I gave up all three for Lent.)
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As obvious as it sounds, we've got the most expensive health care in the world. This remains one of the cornerstones of every health reform debate we have, but a new survey from the International Federation of Health Plans released just last week backs me up. This worldwide trade group surveyed its more than 100 carrier members in 25 countries about 23 different medical procedures and found that in all but one of those cases we had the highest price right here in the States.
Past studies have looked at some of the usual suspects when it comes to cost drivers and debunked them pretty soundly. Our reputedly high utilization rates always get a lot of attention, but Germans spend more time in the hospital than us while Canadians hang out in their doctor's office waiting rooms a lot more.
It's not necessarily a question of free market versus a government-run enterprise, either, since both Canada's single-payer system and Switzerland's market-based set up both beat us in terms of health care costs.
Before you suggest it, I think it's a copout to simply blame the insurance companies, since their profit margins are actually much slimmer than scaremongers like Michael Moore would have you believe. And nobody can touch the drug companies when it comes to making money.
The providers set the prices but there are very few standards and even less transparency in the system. And while price controls might be choking back the rate of inflation in Boston, they make me uncomfortable (to put it mildly) and I can't help but think there's a better way. Besides. rationing tends to follow anywhere you see strict price caps.
Why is it so hard to get the providers and insurers to the table and come up with longer-term, more sustainable solutions? And in a country that gave birth to Groupon and extreme couponing, why is it still so hard to get users to act like real consumers when it comes to health care?
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