Editorials
Rising Cost of Care?
Don’t Blame Health Reform
For anyone concerned about rising health costs and their effect on the economy, consider this grim new projection: By 2019, the nation’s health care bill will have surged to $4.6 trillion, or nearly 20 cents of every dollar spent in America.
That comes to $13,652, per person, up from $8,389 last year.
Outraged that you’ll be paying nearly two-thirds more than you do now? Ready to demand repeal of the reform law passed early this year.
Think again.
The estimate, from the actuarial department at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, actually amounts to a kind of tacit endorsement of the measure. That’s because the new law would have virtually no effect on the upward trajectory of health care spending, while bringing insurance coverage to an additional 32.5 million people and ending the worst insurance company abuses.
Put another way, the controversial reform measure has enough cost controls to deliver protections to more Americans for roughly the same money as would have been spent otherwise. What it doesn’t have is enough controls to prevent health care from growing at unsustainable rates much higher than inflation. That’s not a reason to repeal health reform, but it is reason to revisit it.
Health care spending continues to surge in part because, once deductibles and co-payments are satisfied, patients and providers are largely free to play with insurers’ money. This creates incentives to over prescribe, over-test and over-treat--and to develop high-priced new drugs and other products that are only marginally better than existing ones. There is a lack of any real push toward efficiency. The price for all of this is passed along in the form of higher premiums and soaring outlays for government benefits.
“Bending the cost curve on health care is hard to do,” President Barack Obama conceded at Friday’s news conference, something he downplayed while selling his plan to a skeptical public and Congress.
Ideally, the two parties would joint to do the heavy lifting, yet, an honest discussion of what more needs to be done on health care costs is lacking from the current partisan debate.
Many Republicans have decided to blame any and all insurance premium increases on what they call ObamaCare, even though premiums have been rising for years. And they see a repeal-the-bill approach as a winner on the campaign trail. Perhaps it is. But repeal is a non-starter as long as Obama is president and, as the study shows, it would do nothing to change the cost trajectory.
Many Democrats, for their part, have decided that they have finished fixing health care for the moment. They are not exactly taking a victory lap as they had hoped, as polls show that the public is still sharply divided on the new law. Nor are they eager to move onto a next act.
If the nation is to avoid a debt crisis, that next act will mean curbing the growth of health spending, particularly on Medicare as Baby Boomers retire. That will require difficult and unappetizing choices, such as higher premiums, new limits on what will and won’t be covered, and new attitudes toward extraordinarily expensive end-of-life interventions. It’s no wonder that, in an election year, candidates would opt for baseless attacks on the other side of a head-in-the-sand approach.
The answer to soaring costs is not to go backward and undo the benefits of health care reform, but to move on to its unfinished business.
The above is an editorial of USA Today.
