By Paul Krugman
New York Times
April 11, 2005

Those of us who accuse the administration of inventing a Social Security crisis are often accused, in return, of do-nothingism, of refusing to face up to the nation’s problems. I plead not guilty: America does face a real crisis — but it’s in health care, not Social Security.

Well-informed business executives agree. A recent survey of chief financial officers at major corporations found that 65 percent regard immediate action on health care costs as ”very important.” Only 31 percent said the same about Social Security reform.

But serious health care reform isn’t on the table, and in the current political climate it probably can’t be. You see, the health care crisis is ideologically inconvenient.

Let’s start with some basic facts about health care.

Notice that I said ”health care reform,” not ”Medicare reform.” The rising cost of Medicare may loom large in political discussion, because it’s a government program (and because it’s often, wrongly, lumped together with Social Security by the crisis-mongers), but this isn’t a story of runaway government spending. The costs of Medicare and of private health plans are both rising much faster than G.D.P. per capita, and at about the same rate per enrollee.

So what we’re really facing is rapidly rising spending on health care generally, not just the part of health care currently paid for by taxpayers.

Rising health care spending isn’t primarily the result of medical price inflation. It’s primarily a response to innovation: the range of things that medicine can do keeps increasing. For example, Medicare recently started paying for implanted cardiac devices in many patients with heart trouble, now that research has shown them to be highly effective. This is good news, not bad.

So what’s the problem? Why not welcome medical progress, and consider its costs money well spent? There are three answers.

First, America’s traditional private health insurance system, in which workers get coverage through their employers, is unraveling. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that in 2004 there were at least five million fewer jobs providing health insurance than in 2001. And health care costs have become a major burden on those businesses that continue to provide insurance coverage: General Motors now spends about $1,500 on health care for every car it produces.

Second, rising Medicare spending may be a sign of progress, but it still must be paid for — and right now few politicians are willing to talk about the tax increases that will be needed if the program is to make medical advances available to all older Americans.

Finally, the U.S. health care system is wildly inefficient. Americans tend to believe that we have the best health care system in the world. (I’ve encountered members of the journalistic elite who flatly refuse to believe that France ranks much better on most measures of health care quality than the United States.) But it isn’t true. We spend far more per person on health care than any other country — 75 percent more than Canada or France — yet rank near the bottom among industrial countries in indicators from life expectancy to infant mortality.

This last point is, in a way, good news. In the long run, medical progress may force us to make a harsh choice: if we don’t want to become a society in which the rich get life-saving medical treatment and the rest of us don’t, we’ll have to pay much higher taxes. The vast waste in our current system means, however, that effective reform could both improve quality and cut costs, postponing the day of reckoning.

To get effective reform, however, we’ll need to shed some preconceptions — in particular, the ideologically driven belief that government is always the problem and market competition is always the solution.

The fact is that in health care, the private sector is often bloated and bureaucratic, while some government agencies — notably the Veterans Administration system — are lean and efficient. In health care, competition and personal choice can and do lead to higher costs and lower quality. The United States has the most privatized, competitive health system in the advanced world; it also has by far the highest costs, and close to the worst results.
Over the next few weeks I’ll back up these assertions, and talk about what a workable health care reform might look like, if we can get ideology out of the way.

By Paul Krugman
New York Times
April 15, 2005

A dozen years ago, everyone was talking about a health care crisis. But then the issue faded from view: a few years of good data led many people to conclude that H.M.O.’s and other innovations had ended the long run of rising medical costs.

But the pause in the growth of health care costs in the 1990’s proved temporary. Medical costs are once again rising rapidly, and our health care system is once again in crisis. So now is a good time to ask why other advanced countries manage to spend so much less than we do, while getting better results.

Before I get to the numbers, let me deal with the usual problem one encounters when trying to draw lessons from foreign experience: somebody is sure to bring up the supposed horrors of Britain’s government-run system, which historically had long waiting lists for elective surgery.

In fact, Britain’s system isn’t as bad as its reputation — especially for lower-paid workers, whose counterparts in the United States often have no health insurance at all. And the waiting lists have gotten shorter.

But in any case, Britain isn’t the country we want to look at, because its health care system is run on the cheap, with total spending per person only 40 percent as high as ours.

The countries that have something to teach us are the nations that don’t pinch pennies to the same extent — like France, Germany or Canada — but still spend far less than we do. (Yes, Canada also has waiting lists, but they’re much shorter than Britain’s — and Canadians overwhelmingly prefer their system to ours. France and Germany don’t have a waiting list problem.)

Let me rattle off some numbers.

In 2002, the latest year for which comparable data are available, the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman and child in the population. Of this, $2,364, or 45 percent, was government spending, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid. Canada spent $2,931 per person, of which $2,048 came from the government. France spent $2,736 per person, of which $2,080 was government spending.

Amazing, isn’t it? U.S. health care is so expensive that our government spends more on health care than the governments of other advanced countries, even though the private sector pays a far higher share of the bills than anywhere else.

What do we get for all that money? Not much.

Most Americans probably don’t know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries. It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this poor performance is entirely the result of a defective health care system; social factors, notably America’s high poverty rate, surely play a role. Still, it seems puzzling that we spend so much, with so little return.

A 2003 study published in Health Affairs (one of whose authors is my Princeton colleague Uwe Reinhardt) tried to resolve that puzzle by comparing a number of measures of health services across the advanced world. What the authors found was that the United States scores high on high-tech services — we have lots of M.R.I.’s — but on more prosaic measures, like the number of doctors’ visits and number of days spent in hospitals, America is only average, or even below average. There’s also direct evidence that identical procedures cost far more in the U.S. than in other advanced countries.

The authors concluded that Americans spend far more on health care than their counterparts abroad — but that they don’t actually receive more care. The title of their article? ”It’s the Prices, Stupid.”

Why is the price of U.S. health care so high? One answer is doctors’ salaries: although average wages in France and the United States are similar, American doctors are paid much more than their French counterparts. Another answer is that America’s health care system drives a poor bargain with the pharmaceutical industry.

Above all, a large part of America’s health care spending goes into paperwork. A 2003 study in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that administrative costs took 31 cents out of every dollar the United States spent on health care, compared with only 17 cents in Canada.

In my next column in this series, I’ll explain why the most privatized health care system in the advanced world is also the most bloated and bureaucratic.

By Paul Krugman
New York Times
April 22, 2005

The United States spends far more on health care than other advanced countries. Yet we don’t appear to receive more medical services. And we have lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality rates than countries that spend less than half as much per person. How do we do it?

An important part of the answer is that much of our health care spending is devoted to passing the buck: trying to get someone else to pay the bills.

According to the World Health Organization, in the United States administrative expenses eat up about 15 percent of the money paid in premiums to private health insurance companies, but only 4 percent of the budgets of public insurance programs, which consist mainly of Medicare and Medicaid. The numbers for both public and private insurance are similar in other countries — but because we rely much more heavily than anyone else on private insurance, our total administrative costs are much higher.

According to the health organization, the higher costs of private insurers are ”mainly due to the extensive bureaucracy required to assess risk, rate premiums, design benefit packages and review, pay or refuse claims.” Public insurance plans have far less bureaucracy because they don’t try to screen out high-risk clients or charge them higher fees.

And the costs directly incurred by insurers are only half the story. Doctors ”must hire office personnel just to deal with the insurance companies,” Dr. Atul Gawande, a practicing physician, wrote in The New Yorker. ”A well-run office can get the insurer’s rejection rate down from 30 percent to, say, 15 percent. That’s how a doctor makes money. It’s a war with insurance, every step of the way.”

Isn’t competition supposed to make the private sector more efficient than the public sector? Well, as the World Health Organization put it in a discussion of Western Europe, private insurers generally don’t compete by delivering care at lower cost. Instead, they ”compete on the basis of risk selection” — that is, by turning away people who are likely to have high medical bills and by refusing or delaying any payment they can.

Yet the cost of providing medical care to those denied private insurance doesn’t go away. If individuals are poor, or if medical expenses impoverish them, they are covered by Medicaid. Otherwise, they pay out of pocket or rely on the charity of public hospitals.

So we’ve created a vast and hugely expensive insurance bureaucracy that accomplishes nothing. The resources spent by private insurers don’t reduce overall costs; they simply shift those costs to other people and institutions.
It’s perverse but true that this system, which insures only 85 percent of the population, costs much more than we would pay for a system that covered everyone.

And the costs go beyond wasted money.

First, in the U.S. system, medical costs act as a tax on employment. For example, General Motors is losing money on every car it makes because of the burden of health care costs. As a result, it may be forced to lay off thousands of workers, or may even go out of business. Yet the insurance premiums saved by firing workers are no saving at all to society as a whole: somebody still ends up paying the bills.

Second, Americans without insurance eventually receive medical care — but the operative word is ”eventually.” According to Kaiser Family Foundation data, the uninsured are about three times as likely as the insured to postpone seeking care, fail to get needed care, leave prescriptions unfilled or skip recommended treatment. And many end up disabled — or die — because of these delays.

Think about how crazy all of this is. At a rough guess, between two million and three million Americans are employed by insurers and health care providers not to deliver health care, but to pass the buck for that care to someone else. And the result of all their exertions is to make the nation poorer and sicker.

Why do we put up with such an expensive, counterproductive health care system? Vested interests play an important role. But we also suffer from ideological blinders: decades of indoctrination in the virtues of market competition and the evils of big government have left many Americans unable to comprehend the idea that sometimes competition is the problem, not the solution.

In the next column in this series, I’ll talk about how ideology leads to ”reforms” that make things worse.

By Paul Krugman
New York Times
May 6, 2005

There was a brief flurry of outrage when Congress passed the 2003 Medicare bill. The news media reported on the scandalous vote in the House of Representatives: Republican leaders violated parliamentary procedure, twisted arms and perhaps engaged in bribery to persuade skeptical lawmakers to change their votes in a session literally held in the dead of night.

Later, the media reported on another scandal: it turned out that the administration had deceived Congress about the bill’s likely cost.

But the real scandal is what’s in the legislation. It’s an object lesson in how special interests hold America’s health care system hostage.

The new Medicare law subsidizes private health plans, which have repeatedly failed to deliver promised cost savings. It creates an unnecessary layer of middlemen by requiring that the drug benefit be administered by private insurers. The biggest giveaway is to Big Pharma: the law specifically prohibits Medicare from using its purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices.

Outside the United States, almost every government bargains over drug prices. And it works: the Congressional Budget Office says that foreign drug prices are 35 to 55 percent below U.S. levels. Even within the United States, Veterans Affairs is able to negotiate discounts of 50 percent or more, far larger than those the Medicare actuary expects the elderly to receive under the new plan.

After the drug bill’s passage, Jacob Hacker and Theodore Marmor of Yale University estimated that a sensible bill could have delivered twice as much coverage for the same price.

Needless to say, apologists for the law insist that the prohibition on price negotiations had nothing to do with catering to special interests – that it was a matter of principle, of preserving incentives to innovate. How can we refute this defense?

One way is to challenge claims that the pharmaceutical industry needs high prices to innovate. In her book “The Truth About the Drug Companies,” Marcia Angell, the former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, shows convincingly that drug companies spend far more on marketing than they do on research – and that much of the marketing is designed to sell “me, too” drugs, which are no better than the cheaper drugs they replace. It should be possible to pay less for medicine, yet encourage more real innovation.

Another answer is to point to the haste with which key players in the drug bill’s passage cashed in – making the claims that they wrote a pharma-friendly Medicare bill out of genuine concern for the public’s welfare look ludicrous.

Let’s look at just two examples.

Billy Tauzin, who shepherded the drug bill through when he was a member of Congress, now heads the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the all-powerful industry lobby group, for an estimated $2 million a year. In his new job, he’s making novel arguments against allowing Americans to buy cheaper drugs from Canada: Al Qaeda, he suggests, might use fake Viagra tablets to get anthrax into this country.

Meanwhile, Thomas Scully, the former Medicare administrator – who threatened to fire Medicare’s chief actuary if he gave Congress the real numbers on the drug bill’s cost – was granted a special waiver from the ethics rules. This allowed him to negotiate for a future health industry lobbying job at the very same time he was pushing the drug bill.

If all this sounds like a story of a corrupt deal created by a corrupt system, it is. And it was a very expensive deal indeed. According to the Medicare trustees, the fiscal gap over the next 75 years created by the 2003 law – not the financing gap for Medicare as a whole, just the additional gap created by legislation passed 18 months ago – will be $8.7 trillion.

That’s about three times the amount President Bush proposes to save by cutting middle-class Social Security benefits.

In fact, I have a suggestion for Mr. Bush. One way to prove that he’s really sincere about addressing long-run fiscal problems, that his calls for benefit cuts aren’t just part of an ideological agenda, would be to put Social Security aside for a while and fix his own Medicare program. Oh, never mind.

Nonetheless, someone will eventually have to take on the health care special interests. Who might do that? I’ll write about that in the next installment of this series.

By Paul Krugman
New York Times
May 13, 2005

Last week Standard and Poor’s, a bond rating agency, downgraded both Ford and General Motors bonds to junk status. That is, it sees a significant risk that the companies won’t be able to pay their debts.

Don’t cry for the bondholders, but do cry for the workers.

Standard and Poor’s downgraded GM and Ford sooner rather than later because it believes that the public is losing interest in S.U.V.’s. But the companies were vulnerable because they still pay decent wages and offer good benefits, in an age when taking care of employees has gone out of style. In particular, they are weighed down by health care costs for current and retired workers, which run to about $1,500 per vehicle at G.M.

So the downgrade was a reminder of how far we have come from the days when hard-working Americans could count on a reasonable degree of economic security.

In 1968, when General Motors was a widely emulated icon of American business, many of its workers were lifetime employees. On average, they earned about $29,000 a year in today’s dollars, a solidly middle-class income at the time. They also had generous health and retirement benefits.

Since then, America has grown much richer, but American workers have become far less secure.

Today, Wal-Mart is America’s largest corporation. Like G.M. in its prime, it has become a widely emulated business icon. But there the resemblance ends.
The average full-time Wal-Mart employee is paid only about $17,000 a year. The company’s health care plan covers fewer than half of its workers.

True, not everyone is badly paid. In 1968, the head of General Motors received about $4 million in today’s dollars – and that was considered extravagant. But last year Scott Lee Jr., Wal-Mart’s chief executive, was paid $17.5 million. That is, every two weeks Mr. Lee was paid about as much as his average employee will earn in a lifetime.

Not that many of them will actually spend a lifetime at Wal-Mart: more than 40 percent of the company’s workers leave every year.

I’m not trying either to romanticize the General Motors of yore or to portray Wal-Mart as the root of all evil. GM was, and Wal-Mart is, a product of its time. And there’s no easy way to reverse the changes.

What should be clear, however, is that the public safety net F.D.R. and L.B.J. created is more important than ever, now that workers in the world’s richest nation can no longer count on the private sector to provide them with economic security.

When they reach 65, most Wal-Mart employees will rely heavily on Social Security – if the privatizers don’t kill it. And many Wal-Mart employees already rely on Medicaid to pay for health care, especially for their children.

Indeed, a growing number of working Americans have turned to Medicaid. As the Kaiser Family Foundation points out, that’s why children have for the most part have retained health coverage, despite a sharp decline in employer-based health insurance since 2000.

Yet our current political leaders are trying to privatize Social Security and reduce benefits. And they are slashing funds for Medicaid even as they give big tax cuts to people like Mr. Lee.

The attack on the safety net is motivated by ideology, not popular demand. The public isn’t taken with the vision of an “ownership society”; it seems to want more, not less, social insurance. According to a poll cited in a recent Business Week article titled “Safety Net Nation,” 67 percent of Americans think we should guarantee health care to all citizens; just 27 percent disagree.

The question is whether the public’s desire for a stronger safety net will finally be seconded by corporations that haven’t yet adopted the Wal-Mart model of minimal benefits and always low wages.

Last year Richard Wagoner Jr., G.M.’s chief executive, gave a speech about the costs of America’s “Kafkaesque” health care system that sounded a lot like my recent columns. And his company has made it clear that it likes Canada’s system: in 2002 the president of General Motors of Canada and the head of the Canadian Auto Workers signed a joint letter declaring that “it is vitally important that the publicly funded health care system be preserved and renewed.”

But according to The Journal Register News Service, which covered Mr. Wagoner’s speech, he “stressed later to reporters that he was not proposing a national health care plan.” Why not?

By David S. Broder
Sunday, May 29, 2005

Nothing is more likely to be overlooked than news that breaks on a day when something totally unexpected occurs. That is exactly what happened last week when Senate negotiators struck the last-minute deal that averted a showdown vote over the “nuclear option” on judicial filibusters.

Earlier that day, the National Coalition on Health Care released a report on the potential savings to business, individuals and government from comprehensive reform of the beleaguered medical-insurance-hospital system.

The figures are startling — a projected saving of anywhere from $320 billion to $1.1 trillion in the first 10 years, even while insurance coverage is extended to every American and stronger quality measures are put in place.

Were it not for its source, this would seem like pie in the sky. But the organization that sponsored the briefing is one of the largest groups in the health care field, a coalition of 90 organizations with 150 million members or employees, ranging from AARP and the AFL-CIO to Blue Shield of California and such corporate giants as AT&T, Verizon and the Principal Financial Group.

The man who ran the numbers is Kenneth Thorpe, the former top economist at the Department of Health and Human Services and now chairman of the Health Policy and Management Department of Emory University in Atlanta. Few experts command broader respect in this field.

Thorpe took the principles laid down in the coalition’s blueprint for health reform — universal coverage, cost management and improved quality — and applied them to four “scenarios.”

One built on the existing employer-financed system, supplemented by requirements for individuals to self-insure. A second envisaged expansion of Medicare, Medicaid and other public programs. A third was a new program, with a variety of insurance options modeled on the current federal employees’ health benefits plan. And the fourth was a single-payer, government-financed design, similar to Canada’s or Britain’s.

The additional costs — primarily caused by covering the 45 million Americans currently without health insurance — run in the range of $75 billion a year. But the net savings — after deducting those costs — by the 10th year of such reforms range from $125 billion to $182 billion annually.

When everyone is insured, health problems can be dealt with at an early stage or prevented altogether, thus helping society avoid the expensive treatment that patients now find in emergency rooms or lengthy hospital stays. Universal coverage also can bring savings in administrative costs and, along with the introduction of information technology and systematic measurements of treatment outcomes, greatly increase the efficiency of health care delivery.

Underlining the advantage of systemic reform are Thorpe’s calculations of the likely consequences of doing nothing to change the current system. Without fundamental change, by 2015, the United States is likely to have 54 million uninsured — 20 percent more than today — and be spending 19 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, compared with 15.6 percent today.

Testimony from two top executives showed that this is not just an academic exercise. George Diehr, chairman of health benefits of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calpers), whose $4 billion annual expenditure makes it the third-largest purchaser of health care in the nation, said that despite its bargaining power “we have been able to improve quality and control costs only at the margin.” Its costs are rising 10 percent a year.

S. Gary Snodgrass, executive vice president of Exelon Corp., one of the country’s largest public utilities, said health coverage for its employees and retirees is its fastest-growing expense. Between 2001 and 2004, he said, those costs rose 70 percent, forcing the company to shift more of the burden to its workers. “What I am here to tell you is that the steps we have taken are not enough” to fix “a health care delivery system that we perceive to be fundamentally broken. It will not be fixed by the incremental or piecemeal proposals that are on the table today” in Congress or the Bush administration.

More and more business leaders, academics and politicians are coming to the same conclusion. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank headed by former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, recently outlined one approach to comprehensive health care reform. It would combine two of the scenarios tested in Thorpe’s analysis, with subsidies and cost controls for insurance policies purchased by employers and individuals and an expansion of the federal employees’ health care system to enroll outsiders.

When I interviewed Podesta recently, I told him that I thought that any such systemic reform would have to wait for a new administration. But Thorpe’s calculations, which I had not seen at that time, make the case for action now both more urgent and more practical.

davidbroder@washpost.com