Surprising candor at NYT on health care

The New York Times published a surprisingly sensible piece on health care on Sunday, "The health care benefits that cut your pay" by David Goldhill. A sample

We manage health care as if our needs were always urgent and unpredictable, ignoring how deeply this industry is integrated into our lives, with a vast amount of care now devoted to treating ongoing, chronic conditions.

Our system takes resources from all of us, pools the cost of certainties disguised as risks, extracts enormous costs of administration and complexity and then returns — to almost all of us — a fraction of the money we’ve put in.

Try to imagine what homeowners’ insurance would look like if we expected everyone’s house to burn down and then added coverage for each homeowner’s utility bills and furniture wear-and-tear. This would be insanely expensive without meaningfully reducing anyone’s risk. That, in short, is how health insurance works.

...Traditional health experts may repackage their ideas, but they are never discouraged by past failure. So the new Accountable Care Organizations are a reinvention of H.M.O.’s. The Independent Payment Advisory Board is the new Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, or MedPAC. Bundled payments are the new Prospective Payment System.

We often see some early benefit from the introduction of new ideas, but over time such initiatives are always subjugated by our system’s nefarious economic incentives. Implement cost control reforms and watch providers circumvent new rules and guidelines. Reduce reimbursement rates for procedures, and witness providers expand the definition of required services. Convert fee-for-service reimbursements into bundled payments, and soon more severe diagnoses are given. Attempt to use government buying power, and see providers turn to lobbyists to keep prices up. We are approaching a half-century of fighting this losing battle

...

Here’s a completely different idea, one that might actually work. Let’s give every American health insurance, but only for truly rare, major and unpredictable illnesses. In other words, let’s cover everyone but not everything. It would take a generation to transition fully to such a system, but eventually the most routine and expected medical treatments, from checkups and minor illnesses all the way to common chronic conditions and expected end-of-life care, would be funded from our individual health savings; only the most major needs — for example, cancer, stroke and trauma — would be paid out of insurance.

Defining insurable events more narrowly and enabling Americans to use the premium savings to build health savings would reduce the distortions inherent in our insurance approach. Most importantly, it will also compel providers to compete on the basis of price, quality and service, as they meet the one force that creates real incentives for good performance, innovation and safety: the consumer.

Sheer poetry, in few words accomplishing what took me many pages of "After the ACA."  Newspapers often publish contrary views to show they are balanced (or so a WSJ editor once told me when I complained!) But that this can even get aired at the Times is pretty remarkable.