Professor Reinhardt already said it: “More and more Americans are being priced out of health care as we know it. The question is how long American health policy makers, and particularly the leaders of our private health insurance, can justify this enormous and costly administrative burden to the American people and to the harried providers of health care.”

5 Myths on Our Sick Health Care System
By Shannon Brownlee and Ezekiel Emanuel
The Washington Post
November 23, 2008 (Web posting Nov. 21)
… we dispel a few myths about how health care works and how much reform Americans are willing to stomach.
3. We would save a lot if we could cut the administrative waste of private insurance.
The [...]

If anyone has any remaining doubt that comprehensive reform is close at hand, just look at the response of the private insurance industry. AHIP, representing 1,300 insurance companies, and BlueCross BlueShield Association, insuring over 100 million individuals, in simultaneous press releases have confirmed that they understand that, if they want to continue to insure the majority of Americans, they must abandon their current business model and come to the table with policies that work. Policies that work means that everyone must be included, and that risk must be distributed in an equitable manner, based on ability to pay.

Today’s quote leads to a question: Can Sen. Daschle’s Federal Health Board do for the crisis in health care what the Federal Reserve Board has done for nation’s financial crisis?

Insurance Status of U.S. Organ Donors and Transplant Recipients: The Uninsured Give, but Rarely Receive
By Andrew A. Herring, Steffie Woolhandler, and David U. Himmelstein
International Journal of Health Services
Volume 38, Number 4
In September of 2005, one of us (Herring), then a third-year medical student, cared for a previously healthy 25-year-old uninsured day laborer who arrived at [...]

Aetna, in partnership with Partners in Care, has usurped the “medical home” label to… provide us with a comprehensive primary care system? Well… No. On top of our flawed systems of financing and delivering care, they are adding “customizable product and service lines.” With our system already weighted down with an excess of egregiously wasteful administrative services, they are using the medical home label to sell us even more egregiously wasteful administrative services!

There is an important reason to present the economic data, and that is that we need to approach health care reform using highly credible factual data. Many individuals have an opinion as to why heath care costs in the United States are so high, but those views are often based on nothing more than hearsay, and often are incorrect. Reform must be based on solid facts.

What can we learn from the U.K.? Through a single payer system the U.K. has been able to build a strong primary care infrastructure with teams organized to provide high-quality coordinated care for everyone. They have done this at a fraction of the costs of U.S. health care, while compensating their primary care physicians very generously.

As the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and as a person passionately dedicated to comprehensive health care reform, we need to listen to what Sen. Max Baucus has to say. “Call to Action, Health Reform 2009″ is his white paper describing serious problems with our health care system, and includes a collection of legislative proposals to address those problems. It is an important report because it does represent what seems to be the prevailing views in Washington, D.C. on the direction for reform.

Medical groups certainly have many challenges, but one of the more important is getting paid. This survey of Medical Group Management Association members provides some important lessons.