Yesterday in a radio interview, “How to conquer health care challenges”, with Professor Glenn Melnick  from the Rand Corporation and USC, we were again offered up “expert” opinion that does not even acknowledge the basic facts about how the healthcare system is working today.

Here are a couple of examples from the interview lead by Kai Ryssdal:

“RYSSDAL: Well, let me make sure I understand that. If doctors and hospitals are making less money, what is that do for the quality of care? I’m just trying to think about the argument that’s going to come up on Capitol Hill on this one.

MELNICK: Quality will have to suffer in some way. Whether it’s through reduced access, whether it’s through slower development of new technology…….”

The US spends nearly 50% more on healthcare than the next closest country (Switzerland) and more than twice most developed nations. Yet our basic outcomes of infant mortality and longevity remain at near third world performance. These are the facts of our situation. Money is not the problem. It is what we spend our money on that is the problem. To say that quality will inevitably decline as a result of spending less money is just nonsense. This flies in the face of the facts of the performance of all of the developed countries in the world, except us.

Within the current US performance there are clear demonstrations of how superior performance is not driven by spending more money

Even within the current US performance there are clear demonstrations of how superior performance is not driven by spending more money. Just read “THE COST CONUNDRUM: What a Texas town can teach us about health care.“ by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker. Here is part of Gwande’s discussion of this point:

Americans like to believe that, with most things, more is better. But research suggests that where medicine is concerned it may actually be worse. For example, Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic dominates the scene, has fantastically high levels of technological capability and quality, but its Medicare spending is in the lowest fifteen per cent of the country—$6,688 per enrollee in 2006, which is eight thousand dollars less than the figure for McAllen. Two economists working at Dartmouth, Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, found that the more money Medicare spent per person in a given state the lower that state’s quality ranking tended to be. In fact, the four states with the highest levels of spending—Louisiana, Texas, California, and Florida—were near the bottom of the national rankings on the quality of patient care.

Melnick is not done demonstrating his lack of awareness of further basics about how healthcare works in the US.

There are a number of economists who feel that health-care is expensive for good reason. And the reason is that it’s valuable. That new innovation and new technology, while it may add to the cost of the health-care system, also brings with it tremendous benefits. The real challenge is can we develop a system to do the research to identify those things that are going to be high value in the first place, and to screen out those things that are low value and not adopt them as quickly as we have in the past. And that will be a challenge, but I think there’s potential savings there. I don’t know any country that has done it very well so far, because new innovation is just so complex and hard to predict.

One of the well reported facts about “innovation” in American medicine is that there is no requirement for new technologies, new procedures, new medical devices, or even new drugs to prove their efficacy. This is well known and examples of the consequences are abundant. If we only knew which of all these “innovations” really provided improvements in healthcare outcomes we would all be better of and probably at a lower cost.

I am not sure who Professor Melnick is, but, based on his performance during this interview, he would appear to be another example of that alternative text for PhD.

Be sure to scroll down to the “Yellow” coded scores for the US.

Data  for Spending: World Bank. 2002. World Development Indicators 2002. CD-ROM. Washington, DC

Data for Infant Mortality: CIA World Factbook, December 2003

Data for Life Expectancy: CIA World Factbook, December 2003

All data courtesy of http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php (09/29/04)

The healthcare crisis in the US is growing in severity and yet is not the subject of any real public debate. More than 44 million Americans are without health insurance and almost 65 million will experience a lack of coverage during the year. Emergency rooms are the primary care provider of necessity. All of this despite the fact that, as a nation, we spend more than any other country in the world; 11% more than the next closest country; 90% to 100% more than countries like Germany, Japan, Canada, Australia, and France. Yet the outcomes for our healthcare system are completely second tier and nearly third world.

You may be shocked to see exactly how poorly our phenomenally expensive health system is performing. Just to add some further context, note that Sweden (1st in Infant Mortality to the US 41st position) has a per capita income roughly equal to that of Mississippi (the poorest US state) and spends almost exactly half of what the US does per capita on health care. Examine the Comparative Health System Data in which I have color-coded a few countries for quick comparison.

During our quadrennial presidential personality sweepstakes, neither candidate offered real solutions, really not even a discussion of the issues. We are stuck in a political environment in which neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are offering, and I would argue, are capable of offering real solutions.

Lets make a one basic observation about the situation:

This is not a money problem. As demonstrated by the data on the Comparative Health System Data chart, we clearly are spending enough money in aggregate.

But, this crisis is about money, namely, who gets it and what do they do with it. And, starting from the last serious attempt to tackle the problem during the first year of the Clinton administration, it is very clear that the political system is completely in the pockets of the various interests who have the money now, namely insurance and drug companies, hospitals, and doctors.

It seems obvious to me that we just need to look at any of a number of the top performing countries for the solution. Then, we need to have the political forces in place to tell some of the current participants that the rules have changed.

Central to any solution will be the participation of all US residents in the system. Healthcare is a basic human right and we should not be treated as “risk” factors in insurance company profit calculations. If everyone is part of the healthcare system, then we can effectively share the individual risks and expenses of healthcare across the whole population. Healthcare should not be an actuarial game to derive profit. It should be a system that delivers a reasonable level of service to everyone in the society.

Two players clearly are at the top of the hit list. First, most assuredly the insurance industry, which adds no value to our health care, but consumes by many estimates 15% to 20% of the resources, must go. Second, the drug companies can be brought into reasonable competition for prices that will bring market forces to bear.

Ironically, given the long history of doctors opposing national or single-payer systems in the US, doctors have now been reduced to the status of wage slaves like the rest of us. Many, if not a solid majority of doctors, will support real reforms to the system.

I close here with two basic notions:

• our healthcare problems are not about a lack of money, and
• we need to develop political forces that can overcome the control of government (Federal and state) health policies by the current players in the healthcare system.

Given the current Bush administration, I believe the focus of reform must be at the state level. It seems feasible to envision a single-payer system that covers all residents in a state like Massachusetts. We should try it.