Commercial Health Insurance: Smart Or Simply Lucky?
By Marsha Gold
Health Affairs
November/December 2006
Rapid growth in health costs threatens to reduce coverage and financial protection by making health insurance increasingly expensive. Policy-makers who perceive that they can rein in the rapid growth in spending within public insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid by transferring responsibilities to commercial health insurers will be disappointed. Analysts comparing historical growth in per capita spending for Medicare and private insurance between 1970 and 2000–when the former was mainly a government-run program and the latter was provided by commercial health insurers–found that, on average, the private sector grew no more slowly than Medicare and in fact grew faster on some measures. It is a serious mistake to assume that the cost problems plaguing our health system can be solved by changing the players rather than the rules of the game.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/25/6/1490
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
In commenting on the move of commercial insurers into our public programs – Medicare and Medicaid – Marsha Gold has made it clear that cost problems will not be solved by merely changing the players when the rules of the game need to be changed.
Since cost issues are not limited to our public programs but involve our entire health care system, it is clear that none of the players are globally effective, and that the rules absolutely must be changed. But when you think about the new rules that we need, the commercial insurers, as we know them, will be utterly incapable of playing by those rules.
We not only need to change the rules, but we need to change the players by substituting the one single player we need – single payer.