Submitted without comment is this graphic taken from Brian Blase’s testimony before the House Committee on Education and Labor
Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions on February 17, 2022.
Submitted without comment is this graphic taken from Brian Blase’s testimony before the House Committee on Education and Labor
Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions on February 17, 2022.
Meh. Private insurers pay more than does Medicaid or Medicare. Control those costs then Medicare wont have to pay so much to compete. He likes market based medical care. In theory that sounds good. In reality we have no functioning model anywhere int eh world where a market based system has provided lower costs (saying nothing about quality.) Health care costs are an issue. We need to take it seriously. This guy isn’t that serious. (Am I the only to notice that just eyeballing ti the rate of rise is the same before and after the ACA was passed?)
Steve
OK, couldn’t resist this part.
“First, price transparency will encourage more consumers to shop and obtain lower prices.
• Second, price transparency will help employers establish better payment structures. These payment structures include reference pricing models, in which the plan sets a payment rate regardless of which provider delivers the service and which have been shown to generate significant savings.
• Third, price transparency will better enable employers to monitor the effectiveness of their insurers by comparing different rates received by providers across payers and across regions.
• Fourth, transparent prices should help employers eliminate counterproductive middlemen and contract with other entities that will incentivize employees to utilize lower-cost providers, including ones outside of their local region.
• Fifth, just as sunlight is often the best disinfectant, price transparency will better enable consumers and the broader public to hold providers accountable when prices reach outrageous levels.”
People have actually studied this. Transparency alone does not lead to decreased spending. Markets are a great pricing mechanism. They are not magic.
Steve
More important health care paper, though it does need follow up. It looks like policy , not just directly health care policy, at the state level is having significant effects health outcomes.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2790238
Steve
I have no doubt that state policies affect health outcomes. It’s unclear to me how you’d go about disaggregating the various factors in addition to policy, e.g. individual behavior, group behaviors, demographics, socioeconomic conditions. Additionally, there’s a tremendous tendency in such studies to deal with averages. I’m also interested in medians, modes and standard deviations.
In addition I kind of wonder how the authors deal with missing data. Consider the case of State A, in which 100% of those contacted/registered/considered participate and State B in which 30% do. How do you compare those two states?
I think its a total package Dave. The policies dont spring out fo nowhere. You dont have health care coverage in the states that dont want to pay for it. You get higher covid death rates in the states where people dont want vaccines and wont mitigate. Disaggregating would be interesting but what looks pretty clear is that there is a political divide in approach to policies that have health care outcomes.
Steve
Could be. I just don’t know and I don’t even know how I could tell. California is different in a lot of ways from Mississippi and not just in terms of politics.
You mean like Vermont and California, both of which have rejected single-payer systems as prohibitively expensive?
Honestly, I’m skeptical of statistics about California. 5% pf the population are undocumented.