Negotiating Health Care Costs
Posted on Mon Nov 02, 2009 at 09:54:09 AM EST
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There is a simple explanation for why American health care costs so much more than health care in any other country: because we pay so much more for each unit of care. As [Kaiser Permanente CEO] Halvorson explained, and academics and consultancies have repeatedly confirmed, if you leave everything else the same -- the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the hospital, the number of surgeries we need -- but plug in the prices Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent.
In other countries, governments set the rates that will be paid for different treatments and drugs, even when private insurers are doing the actual purchasing. In our country, the government doesn't set those rates for private insurers, which is why the prices paid by Medicare, as you'll see on some of these graphs, are much lower than those paid by private insurers. [. . .] The health-care reform debate has done a good job avoiding the subject of prices. The argument over the Medicare-attached public plan was, in a way that most people didn't understand, an argument about prices [. . .] "A health-care debate in this country that isn't aware of the price differential is not an informed debate," says Halvorson.
(Emphasis supplied.) What's fascinating to me is Ezra Klein has been one of the Village wonkers pooh poohing the central point of a public health insurance option - that the government does better negotiating health care prices than private insurance companies (for whatever reason you may want to attribute.) His focus on the exchanges and the "regulations" and his attempts to diminish the public option demonstrate that the one of the main wonkers not getting the whole "government does better at cost containment in health care" thing is - Ezra Klein. The irony of his post is rich.
Speaking for me only
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