Quote of the Day
PNHP's Senior Health Policy Fellow Don McCanne, M.D. writes a daily health policy update, taking an excerpt or quote from a health care news story or analysis on the Internet and commenting on its significance to the single-payer health care reform movement. PNHP posts Dr. McCanne's listserv here; to subscribe to the listserv, please visit the Quote of the Day the mailing list website.
Health Affairs excludes single payer - May 13, 2008
Ouch! In this special issue of Health Affairs, we hear once again that the politics of reform requires compromise. The current political dynamic moves forward with the assumption that a single payer national health program represents an uncompromising position on health policy that ignores political realities. That may be true, but does that warrant the exclusion of consideration of policies that would improve the efficiency, equity and affordability of health care merely because the political alignment is not yet optimum?UnitedHeathcare's plan with a 10% medical loss ratio - May 12, 2008
It is astounding that UnitedHealthcare has been able to achieve a medical loss ratio as low as 10%, retaining 90% of the premiums for administration and profit, simply by selling college students nearly worthless products that fail to prevent financial hardship in the face of medical need.Herzlinger and McCanne on "choice" in candidates' proposals - May 9, 2008
Anyone following the national dialogue on reform is certainly aware of the rhetoric over "choice." Those supporting reform that builds on private health plans use "choice" to mean choice of health plans. Those supporting a publicly financed and publicly administered national health program use "choice" to mean choice of physicians and hospitals and other health care professionals and institutions.AHIP on Medigap's Impact On Medicare Costs - May 8, 2008
Medigap plans are standardized supplemental private insurance plans that fill in some of the gaps in Medicare coverage. Medigap plans, as a group, have amongst the lowest medical loss ratios of all private insurance plans; that is, they pay out the least for health care benefits. Thus the plans are very lucrative for the private insurers, but they are amongst the worst values in private health care coverage.Millennials support a government health insurance plan - May 7, 2008
The bad news is that Millennials face "lower rates of healthcare coverage, worsening job prospects, and higher levels of student loan debt." The good news is that they now "reject the conservative viewpoint that government is the problem, and that free markets always produce the best results for society."Who determines whether we have coverage? - May 6, 2008
These two studies released today add to the great body of policy literature that demonstrates that the decision to have health insurance is often removed from the individual and is under the control of extraneous factors.Health Care for Latinos - May 5, 2008
Dr. Torres is absolutely correct, except that we don't need to make it a moral issue. It already is.Understanding your own insurance - May 2, 2008
Although this was a J.D. Power study of consumer satisfaction, it does reveal a very important point. Only 45 percent of health plan members self-reported that they understood their health insurance coverage. The other half didn't, and that was correlated with lower satisfaction ratings.CBO looks at Wyden/Bennett S. 334 - May 1, 2008
Although the bill has provisions that nominally would slow the increase in health care costs, they are similar to the cost-containing provisions of the proposals of the presidential candidates that actually would have very little impact, if any, on slowing cost escalation. It became apparent that adjustments would have to be made in S. 334 to prevent increasing demands on future federal budgets.AHIP on "Health Savings Account Plans" - May 1, 2008
So anyone who can read plain English now knows that the are more than six million health savings accounts. But wait a minute. This study shows only that there are more than six million high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) which meet the qualifications to establish a health savings account. They have only partial information on less than 800,000 actual health savings accounts and cannot tell us whether the other five million accounts were even established, much less funded.Sen. McCain's Guaranteed Access Plan - April 29, 2008
This speech was promoted as a major policy address that would flesh out Sen. McCain's proposal for health care reform, according to his campaign spokesman Jeff Sadosky. Until now, the only real substance of his proposal was to offer a tax credit, $2500 for individuals and $5000 for families, to purchase health plans in a competitive, deregulated private insurance market. Most of the rest of his proposal is simply rhetorical fluff.Is LipiScan a gizmo? - April 28, 2008
Think of how often a medical technology firm has suggested simple, inexpensive clinical management of a condition that would obviate the need to use their very expensive technology. Never? Yet those supporting market financing of our health care system insist that it encourages technological advances which provide higher quality care at lower costs. What we are receiving instead is much more expensive care, often of dubious value.Marcia Angell on relationship between coverage and costs - April 24, 2008
By Marcia Angell | The American Prospect
All of these variations in the Democrats' plans run into this intractable dilemma: If the system stays essentially as it is and we try to expand coverage, costs will inevitably rise. On the other hand, attempts to control costs will inevitably reduce coverage.KFF Primer on private coverage - April 23, 2008
Much of the discussion on reform that will take place in the next couple of years will be on reform of the private insurance market. Of course, that is not the discussion we need to have. We should be discussing how to replace the private insurance market with a single payer national health program.AHIP's lessons learned - April 22, 2008
Those of us who contend that private insurance is an obsolete method of financing health care are not the least surprised by AHIP's statement that "many companies accepted applications for insurance that they should have refused as bad risks." AHIP's contemporary position is that private insurers should not cover individuals with significant health care needs because that drives premiums so high that they are priced out of the market. Instead they support taxpayer-funded programs to pay for the 80 percent of health care used by the 20 percent of people who have higher health care needs.The political rhetoric of "socialized medicine" - April 18, 2008
For political reasons efforts often are made to obfuscate the definition of "socialized medicine," but it is important to understand the meaning of the term. A socialized medicine system is one in which the government is the owner of the health care delivery system, and professionals providing the health care are employees of the government.ANA position on single payer - April 17, 2008
It is gratifying to see that the American Nurses Association ultimately supports a single payer mechanism."Sick Around the World" - April 16, 2008
Washington Post reporter T. R. Reid takes a look at the health care systems of the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, and Switzerland, and shows how each has settled on different models that are simpler, fairer, cheaper, and include everyone. He contrasts these nations with the United States which is "unlike every other country because it maintains so many separate systems for separate classes of people."ACS testimony on underinsurance - April 15, 2008
To keep premiums affordable, the private insurance industry has no choice other than to pass more of the costs of health care on to individuals who have greater health care needs - thus the epidemic of underinsurance.Tax evasion through HSAs - April 14, 2008
HSAs are a tax scheme in which we taxpayers subsidize the health care of individuals with incomes high enough to qualify for the tax relief. It would be inappropriate if these taxpayer-subsidized funds were used to purchase entertainment centers or expensive vacation trips. Unfortunately, the only way to ensure that these funds are used for health care is to establish an administrative process to clear each payment made out of the accounts. Otherwise, the temptation for individuals with HSAs to cheat their fellow taxpayers is just too great. It is far better to remove the temptation in advance than to penalize it after the fact.