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William Hsiao has wise words for us on paying for health care

William Hsiao has wise words for us on paying for health care

“There’s a Fear Factor, a Fear of Change.”

William Hsiao knows more about single payer systems than pretty much any other American. What does he think about ‘Medicare for All’?

By Maura Reynolds
POLITICO, November 25, 2019

Plenty of Americans have opinions about single-payer health systems like “Medicare for All,” and some have even studied them closely. But vanishingly few individuals in the world have actually built one from scratch.

One who has is William Hsiao.

A health care economist now retired from Harvard University, Hsiao designed a national health care system for Taiwan in the 1990s, and helped manage that country’s transition from American-style employer-based insurance to a national single-payer system. He has also designed single-payer reform programs for Cyprus, Colombia and China. And not too long ago, after Vermont voted in 2011 to enact a statewide single-payer system, he worked on what would have been called Green Mountain Care, a project that eventually collapsed because of concerns over financing.

This all gives Hsiao a nearly unique vantage point on the current U.S. debate over Medicare for All. And while he’s a fan of single-payer health care, which he thinks leads both to better health and greater efficiency, he’s a pessimist about its chances to take root in the United States.

The reason? It’s not the economics. It’s the politics.

Given the public’s attachment to doctors and concerns about their own health, Hsiao says there’s a powerful “fear factor” associated with any major change — one easy for opponents to exploit, and hard to overcome. Fans of Medicare for All haven’t yet grappled with the heavy lift of educating the public enough to overcome people’s attachment to the status quo, and the powerful forces that can fan their anxieties.

Opponents of change “have done it before,” he says. “They were very effective in using keywords. The American Medical Association used the words ‘socialized medicine.’ People don’t know what that is. Most Americans do not like ‘socialized’ anything. But if you told most Americans that public schools are ‘socialized education,’ they would be really surprised. Fortunately, we had public schools set up before any powerful interest groups were formed.”

Hsiao was born in China, came to live in the United States when he was 12, and eventually became an insurance actuary. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he worked for the Social Security Administration, eventually becoming the deputy chief actuary. In that position, Hsiao worked to implement not only the program’s retirement benefits but also the then-new Medicare and Medicaid health care programs for the elderly and disabled. Hsiao says that work convinced him of the value of social insurance and that government has a critical role in providing safety net programs for its citizens.

In recent years, Hsiao, now 83, has consulted with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his Medicare for All plan, and also supports Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s version. But his reality-check prediction is that it will take two more election cycles, at least, before the political groundwork for Medicare for All will be laid.

With powerful lobbies like insurers, hospitals and drug companies dug in against such plans, he points to two other forces that will need to play key roles: big employers, which he sees as nearing an inflection point where they will insist on a better system; and doctors, who are increasingly being paid as salaried employees, which is changing their views of private insurance. “When the United States has a majority of its doctors being on salary, I predict American doctors will come out and support Medicare for All,” Hsiao said.

Hsiao spoke to Politico senior editor Maura Reynolds from his office in Cambridge, Mass., about what the challenges are, why he believes the change needs to happen, and how we might actually pay for it.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Reynolds: What’s the most important thing that you think proponents of Medicare for All don’t understand about single-payer systems?

Hsiao: The most important thing is that there’s a fear factor, a fear of change. There is a group of people who are opposing Medicare for All, and that includes the private insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies and, of course, some doctors and hospitals. They fear their income may be affected. So, for the common people, the fear is that they don’t understand how it would impact their health care, as well as their health insurance. And for the vested interest groups, they are in fear of their income and revenues.

Reynolds: Aren’t those fears justified?

Hsiao: I think they’re totally unjustified, but there’s a history to it. The last time the United States talked about universal health insurance was under President Truman. Subsequently, President Clinton also tried to propose a plan. And each time, the vested interest groups put on a very effective and powerful campaign to block it by offering common people a great deal of misinformation. In the late 1940s, the American Medical Association led the fight and called universal health insurance “socialized” medicine. And the Clinton plan, there were TV ads that said it would make medical care and claim filing much more complicated. Both of them, those kinds of public campaigns, of course, are untrue.

Reynolds: Is there a case that proponents of single payer should be making to the public that they aren’t making now?

Hsiao: I would actually show film clips from countries that have Medicare for All, like Canada, Taiwan, Germany and other countries. Taiwan educated people first that everyone would be covered by the same health insurance, a comprehensive plan, much better than what most of the people had then. That’s what I think persuaded people.

Reynolds: Many Americans say that they prefer market-based solutions as a lever for public policy, and those can be easier political lifts.

Hsiao: Markets have a serious failure in health care. That’s been proven empirically in the United States and throughout the world. I’ll describe the fundamental failure. You and I, common people, we have a symptom, a headache, a fever. We have pain. We go to a physician for diagnosis and treatment. That’s not like buying a pair of shoes or buying a shirt where the buyer and seller pretty much have an equal position. We go to physicians seeking their expertise. Even if you watch TV ads for drugs, the drug advertisers say, “Talk to your doctor.” That’s because even in their advertisement, they know you would not understand all of the possible effects of that drug.

So the physician holds a superior position in the marketplace. That’s proven. As a result, physicians can charge you any price, particularly if you are in surgery. If you operate on people’s vital organs, like brain, heart, eyes, and even orthopedics — people are willing to go bankrupt to go see a doctor if they need, let’s say, heart surgery. In medicine, actually, there is an opposite effect [from the way the market usually works]: People believe that doctors who charge higher fees must be better. That’s because they don’t understand medicine. So they figure if you can charge higher fees, you must be a better doctor. Those are market failures.

I’ll give you another example. A few decades ago, American doctors who were trying to do the right thing for their patients, for exactly the same service, would charge the poor nothing. If you were rich, they would charge you, let’s say, $8,000 for an operation. If the doctor thinks you are an average earner, he might charge you only $4,000. At the time, this was praised as doctors performing a social service. But that also tells you what kind of market power doctors have over patients. Can you imagine you go to a car dealer; you want to buy a Chevrolet. The Chevrolet dealer sees you as an average citizen and tells you, “That’s $25,000.” For rich people, “That’s $50,000.” You would say, “Wow. There’s something wrong with this market.”

Reynolds: How do you explain the health care industry’s resistance to current measures to increase transparency in pricing?

Hsiao: That’s very unique to the United States. United States has many insurance companies. The insurance companies negotiate with, let’s say, hospitals for the price, for a discount from their list price. By the way, their list price is not based on any facts of the cost; It’s a price that hospitals would like to charge. There’s no cost study to support that price. So if you are an insurance company, you say, “I can bring 50,000 patients to your hospital.” The hospital may give you an 80 percent discount from the list price. If you are representing a company that employs 200 employees and their families, they say, I’ll give you only a 25 percent discount. If you are an insurance company representing only two employees, I may not give you any discount. That’s why the hospitals don’t want to publish their price, because they may have five to 10 different prices, depending on which insurance company negotiates with them and how many insured people they can bring to their hospital.

Reynolds: What’s a better way of setting prices for that hospital?

Hsiao: I would set the price based on the actual cost of the hospital and give them a small margin of profit, so they can have some flexibility to improve and to expand. That’s how Medicare sets its prices.

Reynolds: Right, but many players in health care say Medicare pays far too little — and that if a Medicare for All system were to force doctors and hospitals to accept Medicare prices for everything they do, they’d go out of business. Do you think that’s a fair argument?

Hsiao: No, that’s misinformation. In the United States, in the same community, hospitals have different costs partly because they’re managed differently. Some hospitals are managed well and some hospitals are not managed that well. This was studied three decades ago: In Boston, for example, for a normal baby delivery, the cost and charges could vary three times between hospitals. That’s one other piece of evidence that the market doesn’t work: that in the same community, the price could be varying that much. So those opponents who claim they’re going to lose money, they may be high-cost hospitals. They may be poorly managed or they may be too small to operate. They should have gone out of existence a long time ago.

Reynolds: But hospital closures aren’t a minor problem. There’s real concern about rural hospitals being the first to close, right?

Hsiao: Yes, you should see them differently. Rural hospitals serve a social purpose. But that’s a special category.

Reynolds: One issue any reform faces is that health costs in the U.S. are just far higher than other countries. Why is that?

Hsiao: Efficiency, duplication, very high salaries for some people. Our surgeons, particularly surgeons dealing with vital organs, are making half a million dollars or more every year. Meanwhile, your family doctors and pediatricians are only making $200,000 each year.

Reynolds: And in other countries, is there less disparity between the different levels of—?

Hsiao: Specialties. Yes, there may be a 50 percent differential. Here, we have a differential of 2.5 or 3 times. That’s how the market works. When you’re dealing with people’s vital organs, with people in fear of their lives, you can charge them much higher.

Reynolds: One of the big arguments in the presidential campaign right now is about how the country would actually pay for a universal system. There’s a lot of discussion over whether taxes would increase, particularly for the middle class. There’s less discussion about whether we should retain an employer-based system, and whether employers should contribute. You’ve recently written that the growth of the gig economy, of less formal forms of employment, is also creating problems for the employer-based model. What’s your recommendation for a better financing system for the United States?

Hsiao: I would base the financing of health care on income because, in an advanced economy, some people’s incomes are from lots of things — rent, dividends, interest and capital gains — not just wages. So the first principle is to tax people based on their income. But I support what Senator Warren has proposed, a tax on financial transactions. You add on only a little bit on each financial transaction, [but] you can generate tremendous amounts of income.

Under Senator Sanders’ proposal, and I worked on the cost of it, you can save close to $800 billion a year — $800 billion a year — from inefficiency, from fraud and abuse of claims, and from duplication of services and also, from using your buying power to bargain with pharmaceutical companies for a reasonable price. That $800 billion has to be used partly to pay for the uninsured people and the underinsured people. Even then, every American, on average, could save $1,000 every year. Those are the numbers.

Now, if you tax rich people more, or like Senator Warren proposes, then, of course, rich people would not save [money]. But 90 percent or more of Americans will find they actually can save money from Medicare for All. That point has not been made strongly at all by the proponents of Medicare for All.

Reynolds: You’ve been around these issues for a long time. Do you think that we’re actually at a moment now in the United States where the American public is ready for this kind of sweeping health care change? Or do you think that we’re not there yet?

Hsiao: My honest answer, even though I know that this is recorded, is that I don’t think we are there yet.

Reynolds: Why is that?

Hsiao: We’re not there yet because the common, average American is not educated yet and there is a lot of misinformation being directed at them. And you haven’t even seen the insurance industry and pharmaceutical industry come out yet with really well-organized campaigns against it. The private insurance industry’s annual revenue is $1.3 trillion. The pharmaceutical industry’s annual income is $400 billion.

They only have to use one-thousandth of 1 percent of their revenue to fight [this]. They can elect the key decision-makers in Congress, [the Senate and the House of Representatives], because they can mobilize literally a billion dollars. And those powerful, wealthy, well-organized, vested interest groups have not come out openly yet. That’s the reality of American money, politics.

Reynolds: And you think when those monied interest groups do start fighting, that they will swamp this new interest in Medicare for All?

Hsiao: Yes. Look at what happened with Clinton’s plan. [It was] only the insurance companies who came out in an organized way for the Clinton plan, and the Clinton plan couldn’t even get a hearing before the U.S. Congress. No committee in the U.S. Congress held a hearing about what Clinton proposed. Of course, Hillary Clinton overplanned the Clinton plan. She planned out every detail; she left no decision for congressmen and senators. But still, not even one hearing. However, I do think two elections from now, the United States may see Medicare for All.

Reynolds: Why two elections?

Hsiao: To make a big change like this, you need to educate the public. You need to sharpen the issues and sharpen the key points. Right now, there’s a lot of confusion in the public’s mind and even among the political candidates.

Reynolds: But it sounds like you feel that economically, there really isn’t any question that either single-payer or a public option is the right answer for the United States. The question in your mind is the politics.

Hsiao: I think that most people who specialize in this field, the majority at least, think that single payer is the right solution because it’s much more efficient. You create a unified electronic record that can improve the quality of care and also give patients much better information about their history and their treatments.

I see changes in America. American employers find health insurance, the costs are rising faster than they can afford. As a result, because of the costs of health insurance for their employees, they can’t give them raises. Meanwhile, their employees demand higher cash wages, as well as to keep their health insurance. That can’t last that long.

Reynolds: So do you think that the employers hold the key to solving this problem?

Hsiao: They do. They are silent right now. But if you look at three powerful, big companies — Amazon, JPMorgan, Berkshire Hathaway — they have united together trying to form a health company, trying to innovate to do something. That tells you these corporations find this burden something they cannot continue to afford. That’s one change.

Another change is American doctors are supporting Medicare for All in larger numbers. American doctors today, 47 percent of them are salaried now. They are not in private practice. The doctors who oppose Medicare for All, the older doctors who are in private practice, they like the autonomy of their own office and they also do not want any interference from any semi-government agency. But the salaried doctors today find that the paperwork imposed on them by insurance companies is so horrendous that they cannot really devote enough time to the patients. They are in support of Medicare for All. When the United States has a majority of its doctors being on salary, I predict American doctors will come out and support Medicare for All. The American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association will not be able to say, “We are against it,” like they did before.

Reynolds: Doctors hold the blame for scuttling a national health care system after World War II, but you think that they hold the key to solving that problem when the next generation of physicians is in the majority?

Hsiao: Yes, and that majority is going to emerge in the next five years. Look at the figures. Already 47 percent of American practicing doctors are salaried. And every year that number increases by 1 or 2 percentage points.

https://www.politico.com…

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

William Hsiao certainly understands the issues, and so we need to listen to him when we try to understand why Americans have not yet met the political threshold required to move Congress to enact the moral imperative of the single payer model of an improved Medicare for All.

Hsiao tells us, “We’re not there yet because the common, average American is not educated yet and there is a lot of misinformation being directed at them.”

Many believe they understand the issues, but when you hear them say that they want the right to keep their private insurance rather than be forced into a government program, it is highly likely that they do not understand the vast superiority of single payer Medicare for All. The fact that simple sound bites can cause too many of them to reject Medicare for All demonstrates that Hsiao is correct; they are not yet adequately educated on the topic.

The rules are still the same. When the policy is right, but the politics are wrong, change the politics. Coalitions. Grass roots organizing. Education. Education. Education.

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Jeffrey Sachs explains why Democratic naysayers are wrong on Medicare for All

Democratic Naysayers Are Wrong on Medicare for All

By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Common Dreams, November 20, 2019

The American political debate over health care is absurd. Americans pay twice as much as any other nation for health care, and then are told daily that they “can’t afford” to switch to a lower-cost system very similar to those of Canada and Europe. If President Donald Trump and the plutocratic Republican party were the only ones carrying this ridiculous message, it would be understandable. Yet this message is also coming from media pundits aligned with the Democratic Party and the most conservative wing of the party.

Let’s be clear on the central point. Medicare for All, as first proposed by Bernie Sanders and endorsed by Elizabeth Warren, is affordable precisely because it is cheaper, much cheaper, than the current system.
America’s health care system relies on local monopolies (such as a health care provider centered at the sole major hospital in a city) and national monopolies, notably pharmaceutical companies holding exclusive patents.

In other countries, the government sets delivery prices and typically pays the health bills through the budget. In the US, the monopolists set the prices.

The sky-high revenues end up as huge corporate profits, wasteful administrative costs, useless and even harmful advertising and lavish salaries. Health care CEOs are making gargantuan salaries, many exceeding $10 million per year.

Who loses? Almost all Americans, whose insurance costs and out-of-pocket outlays inevitably lead to lower income because of unaffordable health care costs, untreated chronic illnesses, premature mortality and personal bankruptcies. Single-payer systems such as in Canada and Europe are cheaper, fairer and have better outcomes.

A recent international comparison of the performance of 11 national health systems on five main dimensions (care process, access, efficiency, equity and health care outcomes) ranked the US health system dead last.

Despite all of this, the US pundits profess to be alarmed about the prospect of Medicare for All. There has been a wave of op-eds and columns published (for example, here and here and here) declaring that Medicare for All would lead to massive tax increases, and that Sanders’ and Warren’s support for Medicare for All threatens to reelect Trump. It’s ridiculous.

Both Sanders and Warren poll well against Trump, ahead in the overall popular vote (though like all Democrats, facing headwinds of the Electoral College).

And at this stage of a national campaign, the goal should be to explain to voters the vast benefits of a single-payer system rather than to prejudge the politics based on self-fulfilling fearmongering.

Yes, one way or another, taxes would rise with Medicare for All, but private health outlays would go down by much more. Total health costs would fall.

That idea is not so hard to understand.

One influential pundit, economist Paul Krugman, has come around. In the 2016 election cycle, Krugman railed against Medicare for All. Yet after Warren laid out her proposal, Krugman supported Medicare for All. In truth, he was simply returning to the economically sound observations that he had long made before 2016.

The pundits seem to believe that Americans will rebel at “higher taxes.” Actually, Americans are much smarter than that. They know that their current private health care payments, whether insurance premiums or out-of-pocket, are nothing other than “taxes” they pay to stay alive. They’ll agree to pay higher taxes to the government if those new taxes eliminate larger private health care bills — again, there are “taxes” by any other name — that they now pay.

Some mainstream pundits are simply repeating what they hear from Democratic Party conservatives and centrists, the wing that has been dominant since Clinton’s election in 1992. They are following the lead of Nancy Pelosi, Pete Buttigieg and others who are trashing Medicare for All.

What in the world are these leading Democratic Party politicians doing in opposing the transition to a fairer, more efficient and lower cost health care system? I would suggest it’s not a lack of understanding. It’s the power of campaign financing. These Democrats are funded by the status quo. The health sector contributed $265 million to federal campaigns in 2018, of which 56% went to Democrats. The sector spends nearly $500 million per year on lobbying. Money talks. Meanwhile, Americans go bankrupt or die early.

There remains the issue of the best way to raise budget revenues for Medicare for All. The basic answer is to use progressive taxation to fund the program. In this way, the nation as a whole will pay much less for health care and the vast majority of households will as well. The highest income households will end up paying a bit more because their funds will not only finance their own health care but will help to pay the health care costs of the poorest households as well.

Sanders rightly proposed a menu of options to pay for Medicare for All, including payroll and income taxation. Warren has proposed one specific approach: progressive taxes on the super-rich and the corporate sector but also a surprisingly regressive “head tax” on companies. She took great pride in not charging a penny of new income or payroll taxes on middle class households. But the proposed head tax on companies would hit wages indirectly and regressively.

Still, both Sanders’ and Warrens’ approaches would result in a more equitable and less expensive system. For most households, overall health care costs will decline.

The most worrisome thing about Warren’s statement as she introduced her Medicare for All plan, is her emphasis on “not one penny” of new middle-class taxes. Here we go again. The Democrats have, for far too long, copied the Republican mantra about “no new taxes,” even as our public debt soars, our infrastructure and public services collapse and inequality reaches stratospheric dimensions.

To honor the silly stricture of “no new taxes” directly paid by middle-class households, Warren ended up endorsing a regressive head tax paid by the employer, which would end up hitting lower-wage workers even though its paid by their employers.

Let’s hope this blunder is a one-time stumble for Warren. Most importantly, both Sanders and Warren are pointing the correct way to reform America’s costly, unfair and inefficient health care system. And this is a goal that most Americans support.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He is co-founder and Chief Strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and is director of the Millennium Villages Project. A recent survey by The Economist Magazine ranked Professor Sachs as among the world’s three most influential living economists of the past decade. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “The Age of Sustainable Development,” 2015 with Ban Ki-moon.

https://www.commondreams.org…

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

This article on Medicare for All is important not only because it is authored by one of the world’s leading economists but also because it should put an end to the opposition to funding single payer Medicare for All though the tax system. Progressive taxes are the most efficient and equitable method of funding health care for all of us.

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Medicare enrollment is a headache for seniors — but the whole system’s a mess

While in the short-term the suggestion to select a plan carefully is a reasonable one, we must push for long-term reform of the current system.

By Shannon Rotolo
Chicago Sun-Times, November 25, 2019

I could not agree more with Mary Mitchell’s column about Medicare open enrollment. The number of plans seniors are asked to sift through is overwhelming and frustrating.

No plan provides complete coverage. Many leave out dental services or stick seniors with unaffordable copays on their medications, as Mitchell highlighted.

As a pharmacist, I see my patients struggle with out-of-pocket costs on medications every month. And while in the short-term the suggestion to select a plan carefully is a reasonable one, we must push for long-term reform of the current system.

None of us can predict if we’ll face a new diagnosis or the worsening of a chronic illness in the next year, so even the most savvy shopper could end up with coverage that doesn’t meet their needs.

Improved Medicare for All is a straightforward solution. It eliminates complexity by covering everyone, universally, for medical, prescription, vision and dental services.

There are important differences between the House and Senate bills in terms of long-term care coverage and out-of-pocket cost of prescriptions ($0 in one, up to $200 per year in the other), but either would provide consistent and transparent healthcare coverage.

Both plans eliminate the premiums, deductibles and high copays seniors face in our current system and the excessive overhead costs and restrictive networks imposed on us by private insurance.

So this winter, certainly navigate open enrollment carefully and lean on loved ones or health care professionals who are willing to help, but at the end of that long and confusing process, write your representatives and ask them what they are doing to support Improved Medicare for All.

https://chicago.suntimes.com…

Why the neoliberals can’t fix health care

Shareholders, Stakeholders, and US Health Care

By John E. McDonough
The Milbank Quarterly, November 2019

August 19, 2019 was a big day for The Business Roundtable (TBR), the Washington, DC non-profit association of chief executive officers of major US companies. The organization released a new “Statement on the Purpose of the Corporation” signed by 183 CEOs declaring that the interests of workers, customers, communities, and “other stakeholders” should be as important as the interests of a company’s shareholders. This represented a significant change from its 1997 Statement that declared “the principal object of a business is to generate economic returns to its owners.”

While actions, not statements, will reveal real intent over time, this change was noteworthy—including for the US health care sector. The subject has deep roots in American society, especially in the advocacy of the late economist Milton Friedman, who derided corporate social responsibility as “fundamentally subversive” and asserted that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, Friedman’s notion powered a movement in the United States, Great Britain, and around the globe called “neoliberalism” that promoted deregulation, defanged labor unions, shrunken government, and ever lower taxes. From business schools to high cathedrals of capitalism “greed is good” became more than a movie line from Wall Street and its iconic Gordon Gekko. Binyamin Applebaum’s new book, The Economists’ Hour, lays out the neoliberal narrative, warts and all, in compelling detail.

What about US health care and this neoliberal era in which we still breathe? The connections are multiple, deep, and noteworthy. For starters, of the 183 CEO signers of the TBR statement, only 11 come from companies primarily embedded in the health sector, such as Pfizer, CVS Health, and Siemens, far less than a proportionate share of health care’s 18% jumbo slice of the US economy. And it is not difficult to view TBR’s statement as whitewash, especially when signers include CEOs of Johnson & Johnson and Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, companies that are neck deep in the nation’s opioid marketing scandal.

Influential US political and economic historians refer to the period from the late 1970s through today as the “Reagan era,” crowned during the presidency of Ronald Reagan who declared in his inaugural address that “(i)n this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” His term in office ushered in the modern era of tax cuts, growing inequality, wage stagnation, diminished unionization, and repeated assaults on government legitimacy. The “Neoliberal Era” may be a better fit.

Coincidentally or not, in the early 1980s US national health spending as a percent of gross domestic product (GDP) split from rates in other advanced nations toward its current extreme outlier status. US spending on health increased from about 8% of GDP in the late 1970s to 17.8% in 2017, far ahead of the nation with the second highest rate of national spending on health, Switzerland, at 12.2%.

In return for this massive societal investment in medical care, we have the world’s most technologically advanced health care system along with the highest prices in the world for any category of medical services or products one can imagine. The rush of private investment capital into our medical sector has resulted in cutting-edge medical care, advanced drugs and medical devices, and the highest salaries of any professionals in American society.

In these 40 years, we also have seen three consecutive years of declining life expectancy, a deep anomaly among our international peers, humiliating rates of infant and maternal mortality, shocking levels of gun violence, and extreme incidence of overweight and obesity. As economist John Komlos has documented, during World War II, native born Americans were the tallest among advanced nations, both men and women—we are now among the shortest. For good measure, Americans are also among the most dissatisfied with our health care system. For what it is worth, money doesn’t buy us good health or happiness.

In this epoch, we have seen enormous growth in private investor funding into a sector formerly dominated by nonprofits or government, in hospitals, physician practices, home health, hospice, air ambulances, and much more. The pharmaceutical industry has always been for-profit, yet its extraordinary concentration has ballooned its pricing structure. The for-profit health sector keeps evolving, assuming new forms. As Gondi and Song document, between 2010 and 2017 the value of private equity deals involving acquisition of health-related companies, mostly hospitals and physician practices, increased 187% reaching $42.6 billion.

Could the investor dominance of much of US health care explain at least part of our outlier status on health spending and outcomes? It is hard to imagine that the investor-driven corporatization of American society could have left medical care untouched. Even today, the most common complaint from conservatives and Republicans about US health care is that government regulation thwarts the free market.

The notion that we could put this massive bulk of toothpaste back into the tube seems preposterous. The economic and political power of the incumbent system would easily stymie any serious challenge, including the apparent one, a nationalized “Medicare for All” structure. Assuming anything of this magnitude could get through Congress—or the Supreme Court—is a daunting stretch. And yet, the real frustrations of Americans with a system organized first and foremost to serve money and power before patients deserve attention.

If, as the Business Roundtable advocates, we are embarking on a new national conversation concerning the role of the for-profit corporation in American society, perhaps we should also instigate a parallel and sustained national examination and conversation about the history, experience, and results from for-profit corporatization of our health and medical care sector. It is clear that this revolution produces good and bad results for American society and for the world. Is it time for a reckoning?

John E. McDonough, DrPH, MPA, is a professor of public health practice at the Harvard University TH Chan School of Public Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management.

https://www.milbank.org…

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

It is important to understand the concept of neoliberalism. It has divided the political left in this nation. No longer is there an unwavering reliance on public social programs since many on the left now believe that the private sector should provide the prevailing influence (forget the right). Application of neoliberal ideology is responsible for flat wages, income and wealth inequality, diminishing worker representation, increasing tax inequity, and suppression of beneficial public regulation.

An extremely important current manifestation of the inequities of neoliberalism is the internal attack on the left against the single payer model of Medicare for All. The single payer concept is one of the most important that would correct the social injustices and health care injustices that are so prevalent in our nation. Not only would it finally ensure that everyone would have access to health care, it would also reduce the injustices inherent in income inequality, not to mention improving the way that we spend health care dollars so that we would be receiving greater value and higher quality of care. Yet the neoliberal element within the Democratic Party is conducting a vicious campaign designed to destroy support for an equitable Medicare for All, while vocally supporting one of the greatest contributors to health care injustice – the private insurance industry and the fragmented, dysfunctional financing system it supports. But then supporting private solutions to public problems is what neoliberalism is all about.

The neoliberals have reduced the Medicare for All debate down to merely allowing people to buy an individual government plan, misnamed Medicare, while leaving all of the other dysfunctions in place that cause high costs, impaired access, mediocre outcomes, and financial hardship. Sadly, checking the campaign donations received by the Democratic candidates who are opposing single payer Medicare for All will confirm their neoliberal bona fides.

John McDonough asks if it is time for a reckoning. Way past, I’d say.

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Dr. Adam Gaffney at St. Paul Athletic Club

PNHP president Dr. Adam Gaffney gave a public presentation on Medicare for All on November 22, 2019 at the St. Paul Athletic Club in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dr. Gaffney discussed the inadequacies of our current health care financing “system” and the urgent need for single-payer reform. His talk, “Medicare for All: Why, What, and How” was sponsored by PNHP Minnesota.

Workers health insurance costs outpace incomes

Trends in Employer Health Care Coverage, 2008–2018: Higher Costs for Workers and Their Families

By Sara R. Collins, David C. Radley, and Jesse C. Baumgartner
The Commonwealth Fund, November 21, 2019

Abstract

Issue: With 2020 elections coming up, some Democratic presidential candidates and members of Congress have suggested ways to reduce costs of insurance and care, including proposals for employer plans, which cover roughly half the population of the United States.

Goal: Examine trends in employer coverage over the past decade to determine how much workers are spending on premiums and deductibles and compare costs to median household income in each state.

Methods: Data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey–Insurance Component (MEPS–IC), which surveyed more than 40,000 private-sector employers in 2018 on their health insurance plans.

Key Findings and Conclusions: Average annual growth in the combined cost of employees’ contributions to premiums and deductibles outpaced growth in U.S. median income between 2008 and 2018 in every state. Middle-income workers spent an average 6.8 percent of income on employer premium contributions in 2018; per-person deductibles across single and family plans amounted to 4.7 percent of median income. Recent proposals would enhance the affordability and cost protection of Affordable Care Act marketplace plans, allow people with employer plans to buy coverage on the marketplaces, or replace private insurance with a public plan like Medicare.

Conclusions and Policy Implications

For U.S. families, the growth in employer health insurance costs has outpaced average growth in median income over the past decade. In addition, as costs have climbed, families haven’t received higher-quality insurance. In 18 states, the average health plan deductible is now 5 percent or more of income, meeting the threshold for underinsurance. While this study only considered families with middle incomes, lower-income families with employer coverage devote an even larger share of their income to health insurance and related costs.

People across the United States are not experiencing health care costs equally. Worker cost burdens are driven by four factors: the size of the overall premium, the share that employees contribute to those premiums, the size of their deductibles, and their income. In Mississippi, for example, people could spend more than 16 percent of their incomes on premiums and meeting deductibles, compared to an average cost burden of 8.4 percent in Massachusetts. In Mississippi, combined premiums and deductibles are higher than those in Massachusetts and Mississippi has the second-lowest median income in the country ($47,800). In contrast, median income in Massachusetts is among the nation’s highest ($81,913).

Higher costs for insurance and health care have consequences. People with low and moderate incomes may decide to go without insurance if it competes with other critical living expenses like housing and food, which consumed 36 percent of average family income in 2018. Research indicates that high deductibles lead people to delay or skip needed health care and prescription medications.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides some cost protection to people with employer coverage. First, people with low incomes — less than 138 percent of poverty (or just under $17,000 for an individual) — are eligible for Medicaid in the 33 states, as well as D.C., which have expanded eligibility under the ACA. This is true regardless of whether or not they are offered a plan through their job. People enrolled in Medicaid pay no premiums or very limited premiums and face low or no cost-sharing. Second, people with employer premium expenses that exceed 9.86 percent of their income are eligible for marketplace subsidies, which trigger a federal tax penalty for their employers. This penalty is also triggered if the actuarial value of their plan is less than 60 percent (i.e., covers less than 60% of their costs on average). There’s a catch: these provisions only apply to single-person policies, leaving many middle-income families caught in the so-called family coverage glitch, where they have an expensive family plan but do not qualify for marketplace subsidies. The data in this report show that the average employee contribution to a family plan is 10 percent or more of median income in nine states.

What is the right level of premiums and cost-sharing for Americans? The ACA set standards for the marketplaces: required premium contributions for marketplace plans begin at 2.08 percent of income at the poverty level ($12,140 for an individual and $25,100 for a family of four) and rise to 9.86 percent for people at 300 percent to 400 percent of poverty ($36,420 to 48,560 for an individual and $75,300 to $100,400 for a family of four). The law also set standards for the benefits plans must cover and the amount that patients pay providers when they use their plans, with subsidies for people with lower incomes.

Congress could extend these marketplace requirements to employer plans or allow all people with employer plans to buy coverage in the marketplaces. But are the marketplace premiums and cost-sharing subsidies set at affordable levels for people across the income scale? Survey research indicates that many people, especially those with incomes just over the threshold for premium subsidies and cost-sharing reductions, may struggle to afford their premiums and deductibles.

Several Democratic members of Congress and presidential candidates have proposed enhancing the marketplace premium and cost-sharing subsidies and extending them further up the income scale. Others also would give people in employer plans the option of enrolling in a public plan offered through the marketplaces. Other members and candidates have suggested eliminating all private insurance and replacing it with a public plan like Medicare, and ending or reducing premiums and cost-sharing. Republican health reform ideas tend to favor replacing the ACA with market-oriented approaches that give states more discretion over insurance markets and the Medicaid program. We are certain to hear from voters on this issue in the coming year.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org…

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

In spite of the Affordable Care Act, “For U.S. families, the growth in employer health insurance costs has outpaced average growth in median income over the past decade.”

Something needs to be done. On “policy implications” this article suggests expanding the provisions of the Affordable Care Act and perhaps adding a public option to the marketplaces. Such an approach would perpetuate much of the deficiencies and injustices of our current system of financing health care.

There is one sentence buried in the last paragraph that describes an approach that would correct most of the deficiencies in our health care financing system: “Other members and candidates have suggested eliminating all private insurance and replacing it with a public plan like Medicare, and ending or reducing premiums and cost-sharing.”

It is unfortunate that The Commonwealth Fund along with other organizations and media sources seem to have delegated this approach to a category of “aspiration” which can be dismissed because of a supposed lack of political feasibility.

Our task? Change the perception about political feasibility. Take to the streets if we have to.

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Universal coverage expansions in wealthy nations finds Medicare for All likely less expensive than previous estimates: Harvard researchers

Review of 13 national coverage expansions finds that universal coverage directed care to those who needed it, but without an overall increase in utilization, challenging claims that Medicare for All would cause a surge in health care utilization and costs

Contact:
Clare Fauke, Communications specialist, Physicians for a National Health Program, clare@pnhp.org, 312-782-6006
Dr. Adam Gaffney, Instructor in Medicine, Harvard Medical School; President, Physicians for a National Health Program; Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Cambridge Health Alliance; agaffney@cha.harvard.edu

The cost of Medicare-for-All reform — as recently projected in an economic analysis from Elizabeth Warren’s campaign — is contested by scholars and politicians. Some predict net savings, while others project that utilization of care would soar under single-payer, leading to runaway costs. However, a new study examining the implementation of universal coverage expansions in wealthy nations finds that projections of surging costs are likely in error, and that Medicare for All is more affordable than previously predicted.

The researchers examined all major coverage expansions in wealthy capitalist nations during the past 81 years. Their analysis encompassed 13 coverage expansions in 11 nations, beginning with New Zealand’s 1938 Social Security Act and extending through the 2010 Affordable Care Act in the U.S. They found that coverage expansions led only to small, or no, rise in system-wide utilization of care. However, in many cases, there were shifts in use — with increased use among those newly covered, balanced by slight decreases among the well-to-do.

The researchers examined changes in annual doctor visits and hospitalizations per capita.  In most nations, coverage expansions were associated with either small (<10%) or no rise in service use for the overall population after universal coverage. For instance, in the Canadian province of Quebec, individuals had on average five doctor visits per year both before and after single-payer was implemented in 1971, with increased use among lower-income individuals offset by very small reductions among the well-off. A similar pattern was seen after the implementation of Medicare in the U.S. in 1966, the ACA in 2014, and in several other nations. 

“Doctors stay busy,” noted study author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, distinguished professor of public health at Hunter College and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. “It makes sense that when coverage expands, doctors adjust their schedules to provide more care to those who are newly covered and in need, and slightly less low-value services to their well-off, healthy, and previously well-insured patients.”

Study author Dr. David Himmelstein, also a distinguished professor of public health at Hunter College and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, noted that the finite number of hospital beds and nurses precludes a surge in hospitalizations after coverage expansions. “While coverage expansions usually lead to greater hospital use among the newly-covered, they generally produce small offsetting decreases among others. That probably reflects a small decline in elective and completely unnecessary hospital care for wealthy individuals, likely a benefit for both groups.” 

“The idea that Medicare-for-All will lead to runaway costs due to an unaffordable surge in health care use is belied by the experience of the 13 coverage expansions implemented over the past century,” summarized lead author Dr. Adam Gaffney, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Harvard Medical School and the Cambridge Health Alliance. “Our findings indicate covering everybody is not only the right thing to do, it’s something we can afford to do.”

“The effect of large-scale health coverage expansions in wealthy nations on society-wide healthcare utilization,” Adam Gaffney, M.D., M.P.H.; Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H; David U. Himmelstein, M.D. Journal of General Internal Medicine, published online Nov. 20, 2019. DOI: doi.org/10.1007/s11606-019-05529-y

Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org) is a nonprofit research and education organization whose more than 23,000 members support single-payer national health insurance. PNHP had no role in funding or otherwise supporting the study described above.

What about the surge in health care from implementing Medicare for All?

The Effect of Large-scale Health Coverage Expansions in Wealthy Nations on Society-Wide Healthcare Utilization

By Adam Gaffney, Steffie Woolhandler, and David Himmelstein
Journal of General Internal Medicine, Online November 19, 2019

Abstract

Most analysts project that a reform like Medicare-for-All that lowers financial barriers to care would cause a surge in the utilization of services, raising costs despite stable or even reduced prices. However, the finite supply of physicians and hospital beds could constrain such utilization increases. We reviewed the effects of 13 universal coverage expansions in capitalist nations on physician and hospital utilization, beginning with New Zealand’s 1938 Social Security Act up through the 2010 Affordable Care Act in the USA. Almost all coverage expansions had either a small (i.e., < 10%) or no effect on society-wide utilization. However, coverage expansions often redistributed care—increasing use among newly covered groups while producing small, offsetting reductions among those already covered. We conclude that in wealthy nations, large-scale coverage expansions need not cause overall utilization to surge if provider supply is controlled. However, such reforms could redirect care towards patients who most need it.

From the Methods

We identified all rapid universal coverage expansions in high-income capitalist nations. In brief, we considered a nation to have undergone a rapid universal coverage expansion if it experienced a ≥ 10 percentage point reduction in uninsurance rates over a 2-year period that brought it to ≥ 95% population coverage. Our final sample included the following: New Zealand—1938, Great Britain—1946, Sweden—1947/1953, Canada’s hospital insurance—1957, Finland—1963, USA/Medicare—1965, Canada’s physician insurance—1966, Australia—1974, Portugal—1979, Greece—1983, Spain—1986, Taiwan—1994, and the USA/ACA—2010 (although neither US expansion achieved 95% coverage, we include them because of their policy salience).

From the Discussion

Thirteen UHC expansions in 11 affluent nations spanning eight decades were mostly associated with small (< 10%), or no, increases in society-wide hospital and physician utilization. However, many redistributed care from well-off populations to more disadvantaged ones. These findings suggest that healthcare supply may constrain utilization increases, even when financial barriers are lifted. Most, but not all, cost projections of Medicare-for-All have failed to account for such supply constraints.

Milton Roemer famously noted that “a hospital bed built is a hospital bed filled,” and conversely that a limited bed supply constrains utilization. Many studies — and our finding that UHC rarely caused a surge in hospital utilization — support “Roemer’s law.”

Many, but not all, econometric analyses have similarly found that doctors provide slightly less care to the previously insured when coverage expands — and slightly more care to those remaining insured when coverage shrinks. Several studies suggest that such utilization reductions among insured populations predominantly affect low-value services, with no evidence of harm. Similarly, an oversupply of hospital beds in a community apparently does not improve health and may increase overutilization of low-value services.

In summary, history suggests that coverage expansions such as Medicare-for-All redirect care to the poor and sick, but need not drive up overall utilization if growth in supply is regulated.

https://link.springer.com…

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

It is often claimed that if we expanded health care coverage to include everyone, as would happen with implementation of the single payer model of Medicare for All, we would not be able to afford the costs of the surge in health care utilization, plus the increased demand for care would require greater rationing with resulting impairment of access. Today’s report assures us that neither one of these claims constitute a real threat to access or affordability.

This important study looked at 13 large coverage expansions in 11 nations and found that, by and large, utilization increases were fairly negligible, thus increases in costs and rationing were also negligible. The change that did seem to occur was that there was a limited redistribution of care from low-value care for the healthy and wealthy to essential care for the sick and poor – an actual improvement in health care delivery.

Thus, when you hear that we cannot afford the increase in costs of Medicare for All, you can respond that we will not be spending more, but we will be spending better (keeping in mind that we will recover hundreds of billions of dollars in administrative waste that can be spent on health care).

Also, when you hear that people will not be able to get health care because of rationing, you can respond that the value in health care will improve because we will target our health care resources to providing more effective care (keeping in mind that all universal systems place a priority on emergency services).

This study further confirms that expanding health care coverage to include everyone will provide greater value and higher quality in our health care. We can’t afford not to do it.

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Experts question whether one Medicare should fit all

Does One Medicare Fit All? The Economics of Uniform Health Insurance Benefits; NBER Working Paper No. 26472

By Mark Shepard, Katherine Baicker, and Jonathan S. Skinner
National Bureau of Economic Research, November 2019

Abstract

There is increasing interest in expanding Medicare health insurance coverage in the U.S., but it is not clear whether the current program is the right foundation on which to build. Traditional Medicare covers a uniform set of benefits for all income groups and provides more generous access to providers and new treatments than public programs in other developed countries. We develop an economic framework to assess the efficiency and equity tradeoffs involved with reforming this generous, uniform structure. We argue that three major shifts make a uniform design less efficient today than when Medicare began in 1965. First, rising income inequality makes it more difficult to design a single plan that serves the needs of both higher- and lower-income people. Second, the dramatic expansion of expensive medical technology means that a generous program increasingly crowds out other public programs valued by the poor and middle class. Finally, as medical spending rises, the tax-financing of the system creates mounting economic costs and increasingly untenable policy constraints. These forces motivate reforms that shift towards a more basic public benefit that individuals can “top-up” with private spending. If combined with an increase in other progressive transfers, such a reform could improve efficiency and reduce public spending while benefiting low income populations.

From the Introduction

In this paper, we focus on the design of the current Medicare program for the elderly to assess its tradeoffs and provide insights about the implications of using it as a foundation for expanding coverage. We first ask about the efficiency and equity tradeoffs involved with its current generous, uniform design. Second, we address the question of how rising income inequality, ongoing medical technology innovation, and the budget pressures imposed by an aging population affect the efficiency of the current benefit structure. Finally, we examine the effects of an alternative, non-uniform benefit structure on economic efficiency and equity.

To study these questions, we build on a rich literature in health economics and social insurance design to develop a simple economic model of Medicare that incorporates income inequality, medical technology growth, and distortionary taxes. The model allows us to assess how the welfare consequences of Medicare’s uniform benefit structure have evolved, as well as the welfare effects of potential alternative public insurance designs.

The model suggests that while Medicare’s uniform benefit has the advantages of simplicity and lower administrative costs, it also comes with a cost of uniformity. While high-income households would likely prefer a very generous plan, low-income households would likely prefer lower health care spending and higher take-home pay or more generous non-medical benefits such as food stamps or housing assistance. A uniform program pools everyone into the same plan, creating an inefficiency due to mismatch between the public benefit and privately optimal generosity.

Our central argument is that three macro trends have increased this cost of uniformity appreciably since Medicare’s creation in 1965. First, income inequality has risen substantially. Rising inequality leads to growing divergence between rich and poor in willingness (and ability) to pay for generous medical care. Second, there have been dramatic innovations in medical technology: there was much less health care available to buy in the 1960s, and even advanced technologies of the day were relatively inexpensive. Third, average marginal tax rates have increased from less than 25% in 1965 to 30% in 2012, commensurately increasing the deadweight loss (or economic cost) associated with publicly financed benefits – a trend that will likely continue with the budget pressures from population aging.

These changes imply that demand among the rich for generous medical care increasingly diverges from what a uniform public system can afford to fund. While a universal, generous Medicare program may have been efficient in 1965 when options for treatment were both limited and relatively inexpensive, tax rates were lower, and income more evenly distributed, the efficiency cost of maintaining uniform coverage has grown over time. The current benefit design thus may not be a sustainable foundation upon which to expand public health insurance.

We describe an alternative insurance benefit design in which the government provides basic insurance but allows higher-income households to “top up” by purchasing additional coverage for additional services. (Medicare does have in place supplemental “Medigap” plans, but these are primarily designed to cover copayments and deductibles, rather than cover additional services.) The basic plan is intended to be similar to public insurance provided in many other countries – with low patient copayments and deductibles but with more modest provider payment rates and with coverage of treatments restricted to those with proven effectiveness relative to lower-cost alternatives.

Supplemental “top-up” plans are also common in other countries. Governments often underwrite a basic insurance plan (or mandate the purchase of regulated and subsidized private plans), but then allow households to add on private supplemental insurance.

Our calibrated model suggests that switching from a uniform Medicare benefit to a top-up structure could generate substantial cost reductions and efficiency gains in the long term. The distributional implications of such a policy change would depend on the alternative uses to which the resources saved on public insurance would be devoted. Many European countries spend substantially more on other social insurance programs than the U.S., and some of those non-medical programs themselves are likely to yield health benefits. We show in the model that there exists a redistribution of the “Medicare dividend” that would raise wellbeing across all income groups.

While our model considers benefit design solely for people age 65 and over, the implications for Medicare benefit design are clearly amplified under proposals to expand the eligible population. For example, while the cost of “Medicare for All” proposals depends crucially on the details of eligibility, coverage, and provider payment rates, most proposals require additional tax revenues that would substantially raise marginal tax rates. The implication of our simple model is that a more basic public benefit – closer to “Medicaid for All” than to “Medicare for All” – with the option for individuals to top up to more generous private coverage, coupled with increased transfers to the poor, could prove to be a higher-value, more sustainable alternative to many proposals that seek to expand the current Medicare program.

From the Discussion and Conclusion

Means-tested in-kind transfers of housing, food, and health care are the predominant form of income redistribution to low-income households. Medicare is a prominent example of a uniform in-kind benefit provided to both high- and low-income populations. In this paper, we develop a model that allows us to gauge the tradeoffs involved in this uniform benefit design.

Using a stylized model, we show how tax distortions, income inequality, egalitarian preferences, and technology growth affect the efficient structure of the program. Our results suggest that in 1965 when Medicare was first created, its uniform generous structure was relatively well suited to the economic and technological environment. But by 2019 it has become much less efficient relative to a “top-up” health insurance program where more basic public coverage can be supplemented by private health insurance. Our results are consistent with policies seen in many other developed countries, which provide a basic universal public insurance plan and where many citizens take advantage of the opportunity to pay extra for amenities and additional services.

We explore the implications of an alternative “basic” form of public insurance that provides more restricted benefits with regulated prices and allows higher income households to top-up their coverage with privately financed plans. Under such a plan, lower income households would consume less health care than their higher income counterparts, and perhaps less care than they do now. This naturally raises concerns about equity. Many who support a uniform benefit structure point to the “right to health care” as a foundational rationale. It is worth noting, however, that a uniform benefit is likely to result in a substantially higher share of income being devoted to health care (rather than, for example, food, education, or housing) than the typical lower-income household might choose. It is also likely to result in fiscal pressures over time that not only raise taxes but also crowd out spending on other public goods and transfer programs. We demonstrate in our model that it is possible to offset some of the equity effects of the top-up redesign by appropriate redistribution of the taxpayer savings generated by scaling back the public benefit.

This top-up structure is not only similar to that seen in some other countries, but is also related to other proposals discussed in the U.S. context, including value-based insurance design and premium support plans.

Moving to a basic benefit-plus-top-up plan would of course pose both practical and political challenges because of the reliance on potentially controversial determinations of cost-effectiveness. Political pressures might, though, play out differently with different plans and different eligible populations.

As new technologies arrive with ever-larger price-tags, pressure will continue to mount on public budgets; and equality of access to care, rather than guaranteed access to a minimum level of care, will become increasingly costly. It is vital that policymakers consider how alternative program designs affect the overall wellbeing of households across the income distribution as they debate Medicare’s future.

https://www.nber.org…

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

This working paper is important because it comes from noted academics in the health policy community. The theme is not original. In a somewhat arcane economic disposition they rationalize a two-tiered or multitiered system of health care financing:

“We explore the implications of an alternative ‘basic’ form of public insurance that provides more restricted benefits with regulated prices and allows higher income households to top-up their coverage with privately financed plans. Under such a plan, lower income households would consume less health care than their higher income counterparts, and perhaps less care than they do now.”

In one of my earliest ventures into health policy, in response to the failure of the Clinton reform effort, I composed a health care proposal advocating for a basic plan for everyone and supplemental coverage for those who could afford it. I sent it in to PNHP, and Claudia Fegan was kind enough to return it, saturated in red ink. I learned two lessons. I realized how poorly informed I was on the topic of health policy, and it motivated me to study the topic more intensively, which I continue to do so to this day. More importantly, I developed a more acute sense of health care justice – that we can easily devise a health care system that ensures that everyone receives the health care they should have.

So why do so many in the policy community believe that lower income households should be restricted to only basic health care benefits while allowing higher-income households to top-up their benefits? I did further research to try to answer this question, and I found an article by the lead author of this working paper, Mark Shepard, titled, “Surprised by Jesus: how he found me at Harvard.” But the historical Jesus was a prophet of social change, which leads to the age-old question: What would Jesus have done?

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Dr. Carol Paris debates Chip Kahn on the merits of Medicare for All

PNHP’s immediate past president, Dr. Carol Paris, debated long-time single-payer opponent Chip Kahn on November 19, 2019 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. Mr. Kahn is the president and CEO of the Foundation of American Hospitals, a charter member of the anti-single payer Partnership for America’s Health Care Future.

Archival video of the debate can be viewed here. Dr. Paris’ prepared remarks are as follows:

Opening Remarks

Medicare for All achieves the goal of universal coverage. It builds on the concept of Medicare, but it vastly improves the coverage. It includes all medically necessary care and is lifelong and seamless. It allows free choice of doctor and hospital. And it gives Americans the freedom to switch jobs, go back to school or launch new businesses because insurance would no longer be tied to employment. Premiums, co-pays, deductibles, and unpredictable and frightening medical bills would be eliminated. No one ever goes bankrupt again because of medical debt, hospitals no longer send patients to collections court for their follow-up appointment.

Commercial insurance, with its mind-numbing bureaucracy, adds administrative costs to hospitals, businesses and medical practices, too. Duke University’s 3 hospitals have 957 beds and 1600 billing clerks! Businesses divert wage increases year after year to cover their share of health insurance premiums for plans that get skimpier and more costly each year. It costs medical practices $99,000 dollars per year per physician just to keep track of billing, pre-authorizations, and insurance company denials.

Expanding commercial insurance could conceivably achieve universal coverage but is that what we want more of? With commercial insurance, your plan can change on a yearly basis, along with your plan’s benefits. What’s the plan this year? A PPO, an HMO, an HSA? If that isn’t baffling enough, you also have to figure out how to budget for the new year’s deductible which is always higher than the year before; you have to figure which providers and hospitals are in your new network, so forget about keeping your doctor unless you want to incur out-of-network costs. What are your prescription meds going to cost this year? And if you are unlucky and have to risk a visit to the ER or worse, require hospitalization, there’s no telling what that will cost.

Sadly, we’ve grown numb to this yearly exercise in frustration and don’t know that in other countries, like NZ where I lived and practiced medicine for a year, people don’t even know what networks, deductibles, co-pays, or co-insurance even mean.

All this complexity exists for a reason. Commercial insurance companies have to make a profit and they can only remain profitable by avoiding risk. Before the ACA, they would just refuse to insure you but now that they can’t overtly deny care based on pre-existing conditions, they have to find covert ways of doing this.

We spend twice as much for healthcare as other developed countries because healthcare has become the most profitable and administratively complex industry in the United States. Every dollar we save enacting Medicare for All is coming out of  one of these industry’s income and those powerful vested interests have launched a multi-million dollar messaging campaign of fear, uncertainty and doubt to stop Medicare for All dead in its tracks.

For your sake and mine, I hope they aren’t successful.

Q1: Why do you believe the approach you have suggested is best, specifically?

  • Medicare for All is the best imperfect plan. By automatically enrolling everyone into the same publicly-funded insurance plan, our loved ones with serious, chronic illnesses and disabilities no longer need be viewed as “insurance risks to be avoided” but rather as human beings to be cared for by the best doctors and nurses in the best hospitals in the world.
  • M4A saves hundreds of billions of dollars by reducing administrative waste and redirects it into improving and expanding care. It achieves further savings by negotiating with doctors, hospitals and drug companies and may finally bring some reason and transparency to the prices we pay.
  • None of the other approaches comes close to this.

Q2: What is the worst-case scenario that could happen for your approach? In other words, what is the tradeoff?

My greatest fear and worst-case scenario is that we pass M4A legislation without simultaneously passing sweeping anti-corruption reforms targeting the dark money and influence-peddling that is business as usual in Washington.

The health care industry alone spent 4.7 billion dollars in the last decade protecting their profits from any legislation that could affect their bottom line. It worked. There was no public option in the ACA, was there?

Today, their new front group, the Partnership for America’s Healthcare Future, is poised to torpedo Medicare for All in this election and the public option, along with it. They have the money and lobbying influence to do it.

But if by chance, M4A should become law without simultaneously fixing and protecting our Democracy from the lobbyists and their money, they will simply shift their focus to undermining and weakening the law’s regulations and tie the regulatory agencies up in endless legal challenges.

Thanks, in large part to the ACA, the government has become commercial insurer’s new cash cow. No wonder they want to expand it while simultaneously destroying Medicare for All.

Marketplace subsidies and Medicaid expansion, which is 85% Medicaid Managed Care Plans, represents a growing percentage of their profits, even as their profits in the private market dwindle.

So their two-pronged plan is to both forestall Medicare for All while expanding their profits at federal and state government’s expense.

Q3: Most experts are projecting that significant tax increases would be required to fund a M4A plan. Raising taxes can cause a visceral reaction in people, particularly conservative folks. How do we get the skeptics to see the value of raising their taxes to improve health care?

In an open letter to the Congress, dated May 2019, 247 economists endorsed both the House and Senate Single Payer/Medicare for All bills stating: “The time is now for Medicare for All.”

The media is more than willing to talk about the taxes associated with financing Medicare for All but seems unable or unwilling to include the more salient point: that the money we spend on premiums, co-pays and deductibles is a tax; a regressive tax. This money comes directly out of people’s paychecks, and is often mandatory. That sounds like a tax to me. Let’s be honest and say that Medicare for All simply replaces our current regressive tax with a smaller, progressive tax that has the net effect of saving the majority of Americans money.

In spite of the fact that reporters and the media parrot the industry’s “preferred language” on Medicare for All, using phrases like “one-size-fits-all healthcare” and “government takeover of health care,” and the all-important emphasis on “raising taxes,” the people I talk to, especially young adults, tell me they would welcome paying slightly more in taxes if it meant they could have the peace of mind of knowing they could get the health care they need when they need it without fear of destroying their savings, incurring debt or even facing bankruptcy.

I think conservative folks could be just as persuaded as liberal folks if they knew this plan would leave more money in their pockets, money they could spend or save as they choose.

We can’t outspend the opposition, but we can do a better job of framing our message in language that resonates with our conservative friends and family members. “Healthcare is a common good”; “it is in my best interest for you to have good health care”; “no one should die before their time”; “I don’t want an insurance company taking away my right to choose the doctor I see or the hospital I turn to when I’m sick.”

As my friend, Kristen Grimm, founder of Mothers for Medicare for All, tells me: No one walks into an Emergency Department with a sick child at 3:00 a.m. as a liberal or a conservative. They walk in as a parent, worried about getting care for their child. But only in the United States, the wealthiest country in the world, does that same parent have a second worry: is walking through this Emergency Department door going to throw our family into a financial hole that could take years to climb out of?

References

Archival Video

Click here to view archival video on the Vanderbilt University website.

Southern Workers Unite Around Medicare for All: “A Tremendous Liberation From Your Boss”

Workers from across the South converged in Charlotte, N.C., on September 21 to kick off a Medicare for All campaign.

By Jonathan Michels
In These Times, November 19, 2019

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—A line of cars rolls up to the government center of the largest city in a state tied with neighbor South Carolina for least unionized in the country. Members of the Southern Workers Assembly (SWA) emerge from the cars and join a picket line of Charlotte city workers. They hoist a banner declaring “The City Works Because We Do” and chant “What do we want? Medicare for All! When do we want it? Now!”

SWA is a coalition of worker committees and labor unions, including National Nurses United (NNU), the International Longshoremen’s Association, and United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. Members from across the South converged September 21 to kick off a campaign for the immediate passage of Medicare for All, known in the House as H.R. 1384.

Although unionized workers typically have access to some type of employer-based insurance (and often pay less in deductibles than nonunion workers), skyrocketing premiums and poor coverage continue to ignite unrest in all types of workplaces. An estimated 23.6 million U.S. workers with employer-based coverage spend at least 10% or more of their income on premiums and out-of-pocket costs, while wages remain stagnant. According to a new report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average worker contribution for family coverage increased 25% since 2014 to a whopping $6,015 annually.

In Charlotte, Dominic Harris, 31, works as a utility technician and also serves as president of the Charlotte City Workers Union. Without Harris and his fellow workers, the gilded financial hub nicknamed Wall Street of the South could not function.

“We only have something to gain,” Harris says. Harris and other members of the SWA make it clear this is a worker-led fight to sever the chain between healthcare and employers.

Harris and other members of the SWA made it clear they do not see this as a fight for a handout; it’s a worker-led fight for a universal health program to sever the chain between healthcare and employers.

“Having Medicare for All is a tremendous liberation from your boss,” says Ed Bruno, former Southern regional director of NNU.

When nearly 50,000 United Auto Workers (UAW) walked off in September, one of their major grievances was the rising cost of health insurance. General Motors (GM) responded by canceling their benefits in an attempt to force workers back. GM restored health benefits 11 days later, and UAW finally reached an agreement with GM after more than five weeks of striking.

SWA members believe a worker-led campaign for Medicare for All has the potential to galvanize a working-class movement in the South after decades of anti-union legislation like so-called right-to-work laws. Just 2.7% of workers in North and South Carolina belong to unions. Meanwhile, health outcomes in the South lag too, and infant mortality rates remain the highest in the nation.

“Healthcare is a human right,” says Leslie Riddle, a state employee who traveled from West Virginia to join the picket line. Riddle, 44, receives coverage from the Public Employees Insurance Agency, the same state-based healthcare whose program incited West Virginia teachers to walk out in 2018. Riddle has Type 1 diabetes and is allergic to some forms of insulin, which means she could die without the correct formula. When Riddle’s insurance reclassified her insulin as non-formulary, her out-of-pocket cost rose dramatically. She survived only with financial support from her parents and free samples from her doctor.

Under Medicare for All, copayments, premiums and deductibles would be eliminated, removing financial barriers to care. This is vital for people with chronic health conditions.

SWA is focusing its efforts on reaching the overwhelming majority of Southern workers without a union. The group sets up workplace committees that help workers calculate how much of their wages are eaten up by healthcare expenses, demonstrating why Medicare for All would be a huge win. As the 2020 Democratic primary season draws closer, SWA members plan to organize town halls and petition government officials to pass resolutions in support of Medicare for All, to keep issue at the forefront of the debates.

Sekia Royall agreed to organize a workers’ committee in support of Medicare for All after she realized that guaranteed health care would allow her to focus on her dream job.

Royall currently works in the kitchen at the O’Berry Neuro-Medical Treatment Center in Goldsboro, N.C., preparing meals for patients with mental disabilities and neurocognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s disease.

In her free time, though, Royall runs a catering business specializing in Kansas City barbecue, a rarity among the famous smokehouses that dominate eastern North Carolina. While Royall appreciates the important role she fills for her patients at O’Berry, her passion lies in running her own company. But pursuing her dream feels unrealistic to Royall, in part because it would mean losing her healthcare coverage provided through her employer.

“One of the reasons that I haven’t tried to quit my job and go full-time with my catering is because I do need healthcare coverage,” Royall says.

roadening the labor struggle through the right to healthcare is what inspired Bruno and other veteran activists, like Black Workers for Justice co-founder Saladin Muhammad, to throw themselves into SWA’s campaign.

“Legislation has never preceded the social movement,” Bruno says. “It was always the upheaval that preceded legislation. You can pretty much take that to the bank.”

Though still in its infancy, the Southern Workers Assembly campaign could prove to be a critical test case for building the kind of large, grassroots movement that past campaigns have shown will be necessary to overcome the powerful corporate interests bent on defeating a universal, national health program.

Medicare for All supporters face stiff opposition from drug companies, private insurers and other medical profiteers who are already well-financed and unified in attacking reforms that would decrease their profit margins. One example is the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a corporate front group created to stymie the growing Medicare for All movement by pressuring Democratic lawmakers to protect the Affordable Care Act, steering the party away from Medicare for All in 2020.

SWA members believe they can overcome their well-heeled opposition by mobilizing enough workers.

“If we can get every worker in every workplace to support just one thing, then that thing will get passed,” Harris says. “There’s nothing that a combined group of workers can’t accomplish.”

Jonathan Michels is a freelance journalist based in Durham, N.C. and a former board member of Students for a National Health Program.

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