These price differentials, it should be noted, have never been shown to be related either to the cost of producing health care procedures or to their quality. The question, not addressed in the article, is who bears the blame for this chaotic, private-sector price system. The only fair answer is: American employers. Who else could it be?
I have been critical of employment-based health insurance in this country for more than two decades. In the early 1990s, for example, at the annual gathering of the Business Council, I bluntly told the top chief executives assembled there, “If you want to find the culprit behind the health care cost explosion in the U.S., go to the bathroom and look in the mirror.” After years of further study, I stand by that remark.
I can imagine that some would look instead to the usual suspects – Medicare, Medicaid and possibly even the Tricare program for the military – but that would be a stretch. The argument would be that the public programs shift costs to the private sector, causing the chaos there. Few economists buy that theory.
Most health-policy analysts I know regret that employers appointed themselves their employees’ agents in the markets for health insurance and health care, developing in the process the ephemeral insurance coverage that is lost to the family when its breadwinner loses his or her job.
Employers were able to capture that agency role during World War II when they successfully walked around the prevailing wage controls simply by having Congress exempt fringe benefits from the wage cap. Employers were able to retain their agency even after the wage controls ended by having Congress exempt employer-paid fringe benefits from the taxable income of employees, a tax preference not granted Americans who purchased health insurance on their own. Retaining their tax-preferred agency role has been of great help to employers in the labor market.
Alas, in their self-appointed role as purchasing agents in health care, American employers have arguably become the sloppiest purchasers of health care anywhere in the world. The chaotic price system for health care is one manifestation of that sloppiness.
For more than half a century, employers have passively paid just about every health care bill that has been put before them, with few questions asked. And all along they have been party to a deal to keep the chaotic price system they helped create opaque from the public and even from their own employees. Only very recently and very timidly have a few of them dared to lift the veil a little.
Employers may protest that they rarely purchase health care for their employees directly. The actual purchases are made by the employers’ agents, private health insurance carriers. But the latter are merely the conduits for the employers’ wishes. When agents perform poorly, one should look first for the root cause at the principals’ instructions.
One reason for the employers’ passivity in paying health care bills may be that they know, or should know, that the fringe benefits they purchase for their employees ultimately come out of the employees’ total pay package. In a sense, employers behave like pickpockets who take from their employees’ wallets and with the money lifted purchase goodies for their employees. Far too many employees have been seduced into believing that their benevolent employer pays for most of their health care.
The result of this untoward pas de deux is the system Ms. Rosenthal describes.
One consequence of this opaque pricing system has been that, according to the 2013 Milliman Medical Index, the average cost of health care of a typical American family of four under age 65, and insured through an employer-sponsored preferred provider plan, is now $22,000, up from about $10,000 a decade earlier. It is a staggering amount, not only by international comparison, but also when compared with the distribution of family income in the United States, with a median income of $50,000 to $60,000.
Another result has been that, according to a recent analysis published in the policy journal Health Affairs, a decade of health care cost growth under employment-based health insurance has wiped out the real income gains for an average family with employment-based health insurance. One must wonder how any employer as agent for employees can take pride in that outcome.
Yet a third consequence of the rampant price discrimination baked into this pricing system is that uninsured Americans with some financial means are often charged the highest prices for health care when they fall ill, exposing them to the prospect of financial bankruptcy.
How long must the opaque and chaotic health care pricing system of employment-based health insurance in the United States persist? I can envisage two alternatives.
The first would be an all-payer system on the German or Swiss model, perhaps on a statewide basis, with some adjustments for smaller regional cost differentials (urban versus rural, for example), as is now the practice in the Medicare price schedules. In those systems, multiple insurance carriers negotiate jointly with counter-associations of the relevant health care providers over common price schedules, which thereafter are binding on every payer and every health care provider in the region (an analysis in Health Affairs offered more details). One can easily link such a system to the growth of gross domestic product.
The second alternative would be a marriage in which the financial risks of ill health are shared up to a point and raw, transparent price competition for the remainder. In such a system, called “reference pricing,” a private insurer, as agent for an employer or for a government program, would cover only the price charged for a medical procedure by a low-cost provider in the insured’s market area, forcing the insured to pay out of pocket the full difference between that low-cost “reference price” and whatever a higher-cost provider in the area charges for the same procedure.
Such a system, of course, presupposes full transparency of the prices charged by alternative providers in the relevant market area.
Because an all-payer system is highly regulatory, I predict the private health care market in the United States will sooner or later lapse into full-fledged reference pricing. It would entail ever more pronounced rationing of quality, real or imagined, by income class.
But such tiering has long been the American way in other important human services – notably justice and education. Why would health care remain the exception?
By: UWE E. REINHARDT
Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economics professor at Princeton. He has some financial interests in the health care field.
