Today’s hearing is focused on “international single payer health system models that provide universal coverage of health care.” I will tailor my remarks according to the three sub-themes the Committee wishes to explore, namely:


* Primary care access in single payer systems
* Health care costs in single payer systems, and
* Cross-country comparisons of health outcomes


Before proceeding with the Committee’s agenda in more detail, however, I would like to provide the Committee with a summary of my main points:


1. If equity and social solidarity in access to health care and financing health care were fundamental goals of a health care system, the single payer system provides an ideal platform for achieving these goals.


2. Single-payer systems typically are financed by general- or payroll taxes in a way that tailors the individual’s or family’s contribution to health-care financing to their ability to pay, rather than to their health status, which until this year has long been the practice in the individual health insurance market in the U.S.


3. These systems protect individual households from financial ruin due to medical bills.


4. Single-payer health systems typically afford patients free choice of health-care provider, albeit at the expense of not having a freedom of choice among different health insurers. Remarkably, in the U.S. households have some freedom of choice of health insurers – to the extent their employer offers them choice – but most Americans are confined to networks of providers for their insurance policy. In other words, Americans appear to have traded freedom of choice among providers for the sake of choice among insurers.


5. In single-payer systems “money follows the patient.” Therefore providers of health care must and do compete for patients on the basis of quality and patient satisfaction, but not price.


6. In a single payer health insurance system, health insurance is fully portable from job to job and into unemployment status and retirement. The “job-lock” phenomenon prevalent in the US is unknown in those systems, contributing to labor-market efficiency.


7. Because all funds to providers of health care in a single-payer system flow from one payer, it is relatively easy to control total health spending in such systems. Indeed, total national health spending as a percent of GDP in countries with single-payer systems is lower than it tends to be in non-single-payer health systems. This does not mean providers are left without a voice. Provider inputs are part of the formal negotiations over health-care budgets.


8. For the most part, single-payer systems achieve their cost control by virtue of the monopsonistic market power they enjoy vis a vis providers of health care. It is a countervailing power that the highly fragmented U.S. health-insurance system lacks vis a vis providers.


9. As part of their effort to control total health spending, however, and to avoid the waste of excess capacity that easily develops in health care, some single-payer systems (the UK and Canada) put constraints on the physical capacity of their health system (number of inpatients beds, MRI scanners, etc). That approach can lead to rationing by the queue. The alternative to rationing by such administrative devices, of course, is rationing by price and ability to pay, an approach used by design or by default in the United States. Rationing by price or by non-price mechanism are just alternative forms of rationing.


10. A single-payer system is an ideal platform for a uniform electronic health information system of the sort, for example, used by our Veterans Administration health system (a single-payer system in its own right). There is a common nomenclature which enables 100% electronic billing and claims processing, thus yielding significant savings in administrative costs.


11. Because they conveniently capture information on all health-care transactions, single-payer systems provide a data base that can be used for quality measurement, monitoring and improvement, and also for more basic research on what drives health spending and what clinical treatments works and does not work in health care. It enables evidence based medicine and the tracking of efficacy and safety of new drugs and devices once they are introduced after approval by government based on results of clinical trials.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/sunday-review/when-health-costs-harm-your-credit.html

Mounting evidence shows that chaos in medical billing is not just affecting our health care but dinging the financial reputation of many Americans: While the bills themselves frequently take months to sort out, medical debts can be reported rapidly to credit agencies, and often without notification. And even small unpaid bills can severely damage credit ratings.

A mortgage initiator in Texas, Rodney Anderson of Supreme Lending, recently looked at the credit records of 5,000 applicants and found that 40 percent had medical debt in collection, with the average around $400; even worse, most applicants were unaware of their debt. Richard Cordray, director of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has noted that half of all accounts reported by collection agencies now come from medical bills, and the credit record of one in five Americans is affected.

The problem is accelerating for several reasons. Charges are rising. Insurance policies are requiring more patient outlays in the form of higher deductibles and co-payments. More important, perhaps, is that while doctors’ practices traditionally worked out deals for patients who had trouble paying, today many doctors work for large professionally managed groups and hospital systems whose bills are generated far away, by computer.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans in poorer counties have few choices of health insurers and face high premiums through the online exchanges created by the health-care law, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of offerings in 36 states.

Consumers in 515 counties, spread across 15 states, have only one insurer selling coverage through the online marketplaces, the Journal found. In more than 80% of those counties, the sole insurer is a local Blue Cross & Blue Shield plan. Residents of wealthier, more populated counties in the U.S. receive lower-priced choices than those living in counties with a single insurer.

The price differences reflect the strategy of insurers to pick markets where they believe they can turn a profit—and avoid areas of high unemployment and a concentration of unhealthy residents they deem more risky.

Aetna Inc. and UnitedHealth Group Inc., for instance, have limited their participation in the new health-insurance marketplaces, where consumers shop for coverage, to a much smaller map than their traditional business. They offer coverage in more counties outside of the marketplaces, where plans are sold directly to consumers and federal subsidies aren't available.

Aetna targeted areas with stable levels of employment and income to attract desirable customers to its marketplace offerings, Chief Executive Mark Bertolini said last fall. "We were very careful to pick the markets" where the insurer could succeed, he said.

Reversing the trend presents a challenge because low-population areas are unlikely to draw more insurers, said Glenn Melnick, a health-care economist at RAND Corp: "I don't think the health law can overcome those economics."

Medicare’s Rollout vs. Obamacare’s Glitches Brew
http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2014/01/02/medicares-rollout-vs-obamacares-glitches-brew/

The smooth and inexpensive rollout of Medicare on July 1, 1966 provides a sharp contrast to the costly chaos of Obamacare.

As of March, 2013, federal grants for Obamacare’s state exchanges totaled $3.8 billion. Spending for the federal exchange is harder to pin down because funding has come from multiple accounts, including: the $1 billion Health Insurance Implementation Fund; DHHS’ General Departmental Management Account and General Departmental Management Account; CMS’s Program Management Account and the Prevention and Public Health Fund. CMS estimates fiscal 2014 spending for the federally-operated exchanges at $2 billion. So it’s safe to say that the costs of getting the exchanges up and running, and (hopefully) enrolling 7 million people in the program’s first year will exceed $6 billion.

Bear in mind that the exchanges won’t actually pay any medical bills, just sign people up for coverage. So billions more in overhead costs will show up on the books of the private insurers and state Medicaid programs that will actually process medical claims.

Back in 1966, Medicare started paying bills for 18.9 million seniors (99 percent of those eligible for coverage) just 11 months after Pres. Johnson signed it into law. Overhead costs for the first year totaled $120 million (equivalent to $867 million in 2013). But that figure includes the cost of processing medical bills, not just the enrollment costs.

Signing up most of the elderly for Medicare was simple; they were already known to Social Security Administration, which handled enrollment. To find the rest, the feds sent out mailings to seniors, held local meetings, and asked postal workers, forest rangers and agricultural representatives to help contact people in remote areas. The Office for Economic Opportunity spent $14.5 million to hire 5,000 low income seniors who went door-to-door in their neighborhoods.

Obamacare’s byzantine complexity reflects the contortions required to simultaneously expand coverage and appease private insurers. And private insurers will exact a steep ongoing toll. Medicare’s overhead is just 2 percent, vs. an average of 13 percent for private plans (on top of the Exchanges’ costs, roughly 3 percent of premiums). A single payer plan that excluded private insurers could save hundreds of billions in transaction costs.