Jenkins on ACA

Holman Jenkins "Obamacare is popular because it failed" from a week ago is worth savoring and has an interesting new idea.

On Obamacare's failure:

ObamaCare’s user cohort now consists almost entirely of willing “buyers” who receive their coverage entirely or largely at taxpayer expense. It also consists of certain users who take advantage of the coverage for pre-existing conditions and stop paying once their condition has been treated.... 

...For a family of four not benefiting from a subsidy, notes insurance industry veteran Bob Laszewski, a policy can cost $15,000 with a $7,000 deductible. In other words, “they have to pay $22,000 before they get anything.” 

In every larger aim, the Affordable Care Act has predictably failed. It was supposed to ramrod efficiency through the health-care marketplace. Instead, it has become just another inefficient program bringing subsidized medicine to one more arbitrarily defined subset of the population.

(On "stop paying," see the excellent paper by Rebecca Diamond, Michael J. Dickstein, Timothy McQuade and Petra Persson. They document that many people sign up for ACA insurance, get a flurry of health care, and then quit. Half of new ACA enrollees in California quit by the end of the year. This number includes everyone, even those getting subsidized premiums, so it is likely that people paying full premiums quit even sooner.



Jenkins links "predictably" to his excellent column from 2010. I also predicted ACA unraveling, for which I was excoriated on the left when it took a little longer than I thought.)

That isn't all bad. This segment of the population does need some form of subsidized medicine, at least while medical supply is so artificially constrained and the cash market regulated out of existence by hidden cross-subsidies.

But the cost has been enormous, and not even Jenkins pounds his fist hard enough on this. The ACA has destroyed the market for individual health insurance, for people making enough money not to qualify for medicaid or other extensive premium subsidies. If you make $100,000 per year (family of four), and not in a company that provides health insurance, $22,000 of pre-tax income is simply a non-starter. "there are some areas of the country where coverage can easily exceed 25 percent of household income for a family just a little above 400 percent of the poverty level."

My dreams of course are free market health care with lifetime, individual, portable, competitive, health-status insurance. I recognize it's not on the agenda. The left counters with "Medicare for all" and "single payer."  A single payer might make relative sense -- a one-stop system encompassing Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, VA, etc., to provide simple backstop health care to people with few financial resources, supported forthrightly by taxes rather than by mandated market-destroying cross-subsidies. But I think these proposals will fail once the electorate understands they mean the single payer, with no escape from the system for doctors or patients, not a single payer for the unfortunate, i.e. the other person, not me. Europe tried that and is backing away furiously.

Jenkins on the outcome on the current path:

Our destination is clear. In the future, there will be one gold-plated health-care system for the rich and workers in high tax brackets. There will be another system for those who depend on a proliferating array of government programs. They can read their future in the latest report of the Trustees of Social Security and Medicare, out this past week. These giant budget sucks are rapidly outrunning their dedicated funding sources. Soon they will be openly competing with every other federal priority for nonexistent tax dollars, including those that the Democratic presidential candidates would like to spend on free college and Medicare for all.

If you depend on government-provided health care, the upshot is inevitable: longer waiting lists, rising copays and steeper deductibles as Washington struggles to pay for the medical procedures it has promised you regardless of whether these procedures leave you better off.

But he closes with an interesting vision

... The saving grace of our funky system is the giant tax incentive it gives employers to preserve profits by figuring out which medical treatments actually keep their employees healthy and which don’t. This shouldn’t be corporate America’s job, but it is. It’s no joke to say many U.S. businesses have more to gain from controlling health-care costs than they do from running their own operations better.

Hence the vaunted new health-care alliance created by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. It’s called “Haven.” If it succeeds, it will do so by figuring out which half (a plausible estimate) of America’s medical spending is a complete waste of money.

Yes, it should not be corporate America's business. Yes, you should buy health insurance on your own, not get it via your employer, as you buy home and car insurance. Yes, this health care system is one more reason the US is becoming more and more dominated by large companies, and why employment in smaller companies, or starting a business of your own, is becoming chancier and chancier. Yes, figuring out what health care is worth your money should be your job, not your employers, just as figuring out which kitchen counters you want is your job. But, as Tyler Cowen points out, large companies have innovated all sorts of benefits for the American workers and perhaps they will rise to this challenge as well.

For example, Stanford and me together pay $26,000 per year for health insurance, plus hefty deductibles and copays. Stanford runs the hospitals that this insurance pays for, which issue the same phone-baloney bills the rest of you get (immense list price, insurance pays about half of that, then some copay for me.) Like many big businesses, Stanford "self-insures," merely funneling payments through Blue Shield and other plans as administrators, but paying all the costs. I guess Stanford can afford to waste about $13,000 along the way, but surely bringing it all under one roof is an attractive option.

When it does, ring a bell for the death of the price system and the market. But I think Jenkins underestimates the long reach of medical regulation. Companies are not free to figure out what works. Even internal corporate plans have to provide a long list of required treatments, and that list will get longer if the government isn't paying for any of it, and only responding to employee complaints.



from The Grumpy Economist http://bit.ly/2LsBLLS