Sherry Glied’s new health care paper
It is one of the best health care papers in recent times, it is here, I cannot find an ungated version. Glied reminds us that only about 1/3 of American health care spending comes from private insurance. Moving to international comparisons, the more general point is that:
…there is no persistent and regular relationship between the structure of system financing and the rate of growth in per capita health expenditures in a health system…the efficiency of operation of the health care system itself appears to depend much more on how providers are paid and how the delivery of care is organized than on the method used to raise the funds.
In other words, as I’ve stressed before, the health care cost problem comes from immediate suppliers, namely doctors and hospitals, and not from health insurance companies.
The best parts of the paper concern equity. It is GPs which help the poor, not additional spending on technology or surgery; see p.18 for other comparisons along these lines. Furthermore, and this you should scream from the rooftops, consider this:
…patterns of health service utilization in developed countries suggest that the marginal dollar of health care spending — money used to purchase high tech equipment or specialist services — is less progressively spent than the average dollar.
In other words, egalitarians should not allocate marginal government spending to health care. And there is evidence that the more a government spends on health care, the less it spends helping people in money ways. That is, there is crowding out.
Finally, Glied offers a summary comparison:
Putting $1 of tax funds into the public health insurance system
effectively channels between $0.23 and $0.26 toward the lowest income
quintile people, and about $0.50 to the bottom two income quintiles.
Finally, a review of the literature across the OECD suggests that the
progressivity of financing of the health insurance system has limited
implications for overall income inequality, particularly over time.
Highly recommended.