No One Would Design U.S. Healthcare System This Way

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S Corlette, CH Monahan. NEJM 2022; 387: 2297-2300.

There are a lot of problems with the U.S. Healthcare system. This article focuses on healthcare coverage.

The U.S. has a patchwork system of health insurance coverage “in which people’s access to services and level of financial protection — not to mention whether they have coverage at all — varies depending on their birthplace, age, job, income, location, and health status…Many people in the United States work for employers that do not offer insurance or do not sufficiently subsidize it, making it unaffordable for lower-income workers.”

“No one would purposefully design the system we have. Unlike many of our peer countries, the United States has never had a centrally planned, cohesive system to help its citizens obtain and pay for health care services. Ours is a system built on happenstance, unintended consequences, and gap filling…”

“The United States has made sporadic efforts at creating a national system of health coverage…These efforts all foundered in the face of opposition from health insurers, the American Medical Association, and other health industry stakeholders, as well as concerns about the proposals’ costs.”

“Americans who have “good” insurance today may be surprised to learn that they, too, are vulnerable. Underinsurance is a growing problem, as fewer and fewer Americans are able to afford their share of costs. Premiums and deductibles continue to increase as health care costs rise, straining the budgets of families, employers, and state and federal governments. Unless and until policymakers curtail the power of health care monopolies to drive up costs and do more to limit health care prices across our array of public and private coverage systems, virtually everyone’s access to affordable care is at risk… the primary reason millions of Americans remain uninsured or have insurance coverage that leaves them financially exposed is the high costs in our health care system. Constraining the growth of costs while reducing inequities in access and outcomes will require new but difficult reforms.” 

My take: There are no simple solutions to the high costs of our health care or to assuring adequate coverage. At every level, there are excessive costs which undermine these goals:

  • Hospitals charge exorbitant fees and try to monopolize markets
  • Insurance companies have split loyalties and often deny expensive but necessary care
  • Pharmaceutical companies charge as much as the market will bear even with older generics. Increasingly, newer medications are very expensive
  • Health care providers have no incentives to constrain costs. Even salaried physicians may feel complicit by being part of systems owned by hospitals and venture capital firms which have excessive charges.
  • Wasteful (low value) practices are widespread

Related article: NY Times, Eric Reinhart 2/5/23: Doctors Aren’t Burned Out From Overwork. We’re Demoralized by Our Health System.

Excerpts:

“For decades, ‌at least tens of thousands of preventable deaths have occurred each year because health care here is so expensive…

Although deaths from Covid have slowed, the ‌disillusionment among health workers has ‌only increased. Recent exposés have further laid bare the structural perversity of our institutions‌‌. For instance, according to an investigation in The New York Times, ostensibly nonprofit‌ charity hospitals have illegally saddl‌ed poor patients with debt for receiving‌‌ care to which they were entitled without cost and have exploited tax incentives meant to promote care for poor communities to turn ‌‌large profits. Hospitals are deliberately understaffing themselves and undercutting patient care while sitting on billions of dollars in cash reserves. Little of this is new, but doctors’ sense of our complicity in putting profits over people has ‌grown more difficult to ignore…

And many physicians are now finding it difficult to quash the suspicion that our institutions, and much of our work inside them, primarily serve a moneymaking machine…Our health care institutions as they exist today are part of the problem rather than the solution.”

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