Medicare’s Rollout vs. Obamacare’s Glitches Brew
By David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler
Health Affairs Blog, January 2, 2014
The smooth and inexpensive rollout of Medicare on July 1, 1966 provides a sharp contrast to the costly chaos of Obamacare.
We won’t rehearse the chaos part here, just the costs.
As of March, 2013, federal grants for Obamacare’s state exchanges totaled $3.8 billion. Spending for the federal exchange is harder to pin down because funding has come from multiple accounts, including: the $1 billion Health Insurance Implementation Fund; DHHS’ General Departmental Management Account and General Departmental Management Account; CMS’s Program Management Account and the Prevention and Public Health Fund. CMS estimates fiscal 2014 spending for the federally-operated exchanges at $2 billion. So it’s safe to say that the costs of getting the exchanges up and running, and (hopefully) enrolling 7 million people in the program’s first year will exceed $6 billion.
Bear in mind that the exchanges won’t actually pay any medical bills, just sign people up for coverage. So billions more in overhead costs will show up on the books of the private insurers and state Medicaid programs that will actually process medical claims.
Back in 1966, Medicare started paying bills for 18.9 million seniors (99 percent of those eligible for coverage) just 11 months after Pres. Johnson signed it into law. Overhead costs for the first year totaled $120 million (equivalent to $867 million in 2013). But that figure includes the cost of processing medical bills, not just the enrollment costs
Moreover, Medicare and Medicaid (which was passed at the same time) displaced several smaller federal health assistance programs, saving about $376 million on their overhead costs (2013 dollars).
Signing up most of the elderly for Medicare was simple; they were already known to Social Security Administration, which handled enrollment. To find the rest, the feds sent out mailings to seniors, held local meetings, and asked postal workers, forest rangers and agricultural representatives to help contact people in remote areas. The Office for Economic Opportunity spent $14.5 million to hire 5,000 low income seniors who went door-to-door in their neighborhoods.
Despite predictions of chaos, and worries that the newly-insured seniors would flood the health care system, there were few bottlenecks. Hospitals continued to operate smoothly and no waiting lists materialized. The only real “glitch” was that many hospitals in the Deep South initially refused to integrate their facilities – which Medicare required for certification and payment. But by the end of the first month, 99.5 percent of hospitals had signed on.
Obamacare’s start-up has been rocky because complexity is “baked in” to the design, just as simplicity was “baked in” to Medicare. Obamacare’s exchanges must coordinate thousands of different plans, with premiums, co-payments, deductibles and provider networks that vary county-by-county; Medicare offered a single, uniform plan. The exchanges must calculate subsidies for each applicant after first verifying income, family size and immigration status; Medicare offered free hospital coverage, with a minimal ($22) uniform premium for doctor coverage. Instead of setting up a new bureaucracy to collect premiums from millions of enrollees and funnel them to private insurers, Medicare relied on the existing payroll and income tax system to garner funds.
Obamacare’s byzantine complexity reflects the contortions required to simultaneously expand coverage and appease private insurers. And private insurers will exact a steep ongoing toll. Medicare’s overhead is just 2 percent, vs. an average of 13 percent for private plans (on top of the Exchanges’ costs, roughly 3 percent of premiums). A single payer plan that excluded private insurers could save hundreds of billions in transaction costs.
Medical quality improvement experts often advise hospitals to “avoid workarounds”; fix system defects rather than force doctors and nurses to sidestep problems like faulty equipment, understaffing, or illegible handwritings. This advice is equally valid for health reform. To avoid glitches and wasteful expense, design the system right; eliminate private insurers and cover everyone under a single payer program.
http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2014/01/02/medicares-rollout-vs-obamacares-glitches-brew/
PNHP’s press release: https://www.pnhp.org/news/2014/january/medicare%E2%80%99s-1966-glitch-free-rollout-a-sharp-contrast-with-obamacare-health-affairs
Comment:
From PNHP’s press release:
“Obamacare is a giant workaround crafted to keep private insurers at the center of the health care system,” said co-author Dr. David Himmelstein, a primary care physician, professor of public health at the City University of New York and lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School.
“The simple single-payer, Medicare-for-all approach would save more than $400 billion annually on bureaucracy, enough to give every American first-dollar coverage. But to get those savings you have to break private insurers’ stranglehold on health care and on Washington,” he said, adding, “The glitches in Obamacare’s rollout don’t come from government incompetence, but from political cowardice.”