You Call That Health Reform?

These days when people ask about health reform, I’m reminded of Gandhi’s visit to England in 1931. Somebody asked him what he thought of “Western civilization” and his answer was, “I think it would be a good idea.”

That’s how I feel about health reform: It would be a good idea.

The truth is that what we’ve been calling health reform doesn’t really “reform” the system at all. It mostly shifts responsibility from one part of the economy to the other. While the Senate’s misguided excise tax places undue and unfair pressure on working people’s health plans, both bills squeeze the middle-class enormously. How? By mandating the purchase of costly and inefficient private insurance, in order to create conditions where the lower-income uninsured can receive coverage. Maybe we should call it “health inefficiency redistribution” instead, since the few cost-containment provisions are in all likelihood being oversold.

That said, the current House and Senate bills would both accomplish some very important things. But these bills do little to lower costs, and it didn’t have to be this way. This seems like a good time to get out of the weeds and look at the situation from a slightly broader perspective.

Here are some thoughts that might help sketch the outline of real reform:

People don’t understand how the money really flows in InsuranceLand.

Ezra Klein will point out that insurance company profit margins are low. They are, but as I pointed out here, the really big insurers have better-than-average margins – and most people are covered by really big insurers.

Even more importantly, margins are artificially low for health insurers. Think of it this way: Let’s say you hire me to pay your bills for $5 each. The first bill is for $1,000, so I charge you $1,005. My profit margin is very low (0.5%), but I just made five bucks and all it took was a second to write the check (and 42 cents for the stamp). Sweet. If I do that 10,000 times I day I’m rolling in cash … and I when I bitch about my profit margins, it’ll sound reasonable to lots of Democrats and liberals.

With the cost inflation we’re seeing, health insurers aren’t “managing” anything. Like my example above, they’re just writing checks. They should be treated that way – as overpaid performers of a clerical function – until they demonstrate that they can do their jobs better. We could make some accounting changes, too.

The idea that insurers have to pay 90% of whatever they charge for medical expenses sounds good, but …

if that happens, what’s the one sure way to make sure they have more profit in the years to come? Charge more! If you only get to keep ten cents on the dollar, the only sure way to get more money is to collect more dollars. Don’t think they’d do that? I hope you’re right. But at a minimum, it certainly doesn’t give them much incentive to lower costs, does it?

There are more creative ways to accomplish the same goal – and give them the right incentives.

We already have single-payer in most of the country – but it’s private single-payer.

One study has shown that 94% of health insurance market areas in this country have a near-monopoly situation, while another showed that in 16% of markets they studied one carrier had 90% or more of the market. We have near-single-payer or absolute singer-payer in wide swaths of the country – but it’s single-payer in the hands of a profit-making elite answerable to no one.

Real health reform would do something about that.

Meanwhile, here in the real world …

So, what about the health reform we do have? I had already said that the watered-down public option probably wasn’t worth keeping, and that advocates should hang tough in favor of something more robust. Medicare expansion seemed like a good alternative to that weak public option in certain ways, although that’s a tough choice to be forced to make. There are also many unanswered questions – and it could become a dumping ground for bad risk. The number of people eligible for the plan is likely to be extremely small. And I never underestimate the political process and its ability to mess up even a marginally good thing. (See reports that Kent Conrad was trying to ensure that the expanded Medicare program can’t use Medicare rates – an idea that would rob it of any real value.)

So the Medicare expansion, even if it’s not diluted any further, is a backdown from a compromise proposal that was a itself compromise from the Democrats’ 2008 campaign pledges – pledges which were themselves less than what most experts felt needed to be done. A compromise of a compromise of a compromise of a compromise: I’ll let others decide if that’s the best we can expect from (and for) our nation.

Any good news? Sure. Both the Senate and House bills provide insurance to the lower-income uninsured (although the subsidies are too weak), create portability for people with pre-existing conditions, and limit out-of-pocket costs. (Note that I said limit and not reduce. From what I’ve seen, neither bill would lower those costs much, but they’d cap them.) But would the bill be “a pretty remarkable accomplishment,” as Mike Lux put it? Only if you grade on an extremely steep curve – one in which an “A” is not the health reform we should have, or even the one that was promised by Democrats in the 2008 election, but is the result of a process that seemed to lack the best our leaders can offer in the way of imagination and decisive leadership.

Maybe, once the bill is passed, we could use the enormous reservoir of talent our leaders possess to begin work on real reform. The work won’t end then – it’ll just be beginning.