Screwing Up Healthcare with Government-Created Third-Party Payer June 7, 2019 by Dan Mitchell

In addition to speaking on tax competition at the European Resource Bank in Moldova, I also appeared on a panel about healthcare.

I used the opportunity to explain how government-created “third-party payer” has crippled market forces in the United States and produced inefficiency and needlessly high costs.

There are two visuals from my presentation I want to highlight.

First, I took Milton Friedman’s explanation of the how people care about cost and quality depending on whether they’re spendingf their own money and whether they’re buying for themselves, and I then showed how it applies to America’s healthcare system.

Ideally, purchases are made in quadrant 1. Thanks to government distortions, however, most health spending in America occurs in quadrants 2, 3, and 4.

When purchases occur in quadrant 1, buyers and sellers directly interact and there are incentives on both sides to get the most value.

That’s not the case, though, with purchases in the other quadrants.

I illustrated the problem with a slide that looks at the layers that exist between health consumers and health providers.

I also shared data on how third-party payer causes higher prices in every sector where it exists and also pointed out that we see falling prices in the few parts of the healthcare sector where people actually buy with their own money.

But that’s old news.

Let look at some new information.

Doctor Scott Atlas, in a column for today’s Wall Street Journal, concisely explains the problem of government-created third-party payer.

In an effort to bring down the costs of medical care, the Trump administration wants to make prices visible to patients, and it’s moving aggressively to make that happen. …A new executive order will require providers paid by Medicare to post prices for a range of procedures. Meanwhile, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently finalized its mandate requiring pharmaceutical manufacturers to disclose the list price of prescription drugs in direct-to-consumer television advertisements. …Yet these moves won’t be enough to bring down prices. Transparency, though essential, is not sufficient. Nor does it always need to be legislated. Laws aren’t required to force sellers of food, computers or clothing to post prices. That information is driven by consumers who actively seek value for their money. …But patients typically don’t even ask about prices, because they figure “it’s all covered by insurance.” The harmful U.S. model is unfortunately that insurance should minimize any out-of-pocket payment. Health care may be the only good or service in America that is bought and used without knowing its cost. Unfortunately, the Affordable Care Act instilled even broader coverage requirements and added counterproductive subsidies that encouraged more-widespread adoption of bloated insurance, reinforcing a model of coverage that prevents patients from caring about prices.

How do we fix the problem?

Dr. Atlas says people need to have control over their healthcare dollars.

To bring prices down, …patients must have stronger incentives to consider price. …But as long as insurance minimizes the patient’s share of cost, the patient won’t bother price shopping. For price-transparency to have the most impact, it must increase visibility of the only price relevant to patients—out-of-pocket costs at the time of purchase. Cheaper insurance policies with higher deductibles, coupled with large, liberalized-use, permanently owned health savings accounts, are also important to motivate consideration of price. …We can make medical care more affordable without moving to a single-payer system. Centralized models uniformly regulate costs by restricting health-care use, generating lengthy delays for needed care, limiting access to important drugs and technology, and ultimately resulting in worse disease outcomes. The better path will involve reducing the cost of medical care itself by creating the conditions that bring down prices in every other area of the economy: incentivizing empowered consumers and increasing the supply of medical care to stimulate competition among providers.

Amen.

That means reforming Medicare and Medicaid, where the government directly creates third-party payer.

And it means reforming the tax code, where the government indirectly creates third-party payer with a big preference for over-insurance.

At the risk of upsetting some people, it even means defending the “Cadillac tax,” a provision of Obamacare.

And even agreeing with the Washington Post, which opined today in favor of that provision.

Consider the House supermajority, made up of Democrats and Republicans favoring repeal of the excise tax on high-cost health insurance plans, which would otherwise take effect in 2022. …the bill is backed by a potent lobbying coalition including insurance companies, labor unions — and even ExxonMobil. …Known as the “Cadillac tax” because it applies to especially generous “Cadillac” health plans, the tax equals 40 percent of the value of private-sector health benefits exceeding $11,200 for single coverage and $30,150 for family coverage in 2022. Albeit indirectly, the tax chips away at one of the largest subsidies in the health-insurance system, the tax exclusion for employer-paid health insurance… A wide consensus of economists identifies the tax exclusion as a major source of distortion in the U.S. system, building a higher floor under costs… The Cadillac tax would curb these tendencies… killing the Cadillac tax… The United States’ already out-of-whack health-care system will become more so, and bipartisan profligacy and pandering will have triumphed again.

Let’s close with a bit of dark humor.

One of my many frustrations is that people blame the free market for the various government-caused problems in healthcare. Here’s a way of visualizing it.

Government intervenes, which causes problems, and those problems are then used as an excuse for additional intervention. Sort of a turbo-charged version of Mitchell’s Law.

Ultimately, this process may lead politicians to adopt something really crazy, such as “Medicare for All.”