January 23, 2006
Bush push for more health savings accounts
This weekend, President Bush, in his weekly radio address, said he plans to help reduce health care costs by pushing for an expansion of health savings accounts.
"I decided this is a national issue that requires a national response," Bush said, adding that the government must ensure "that health care is available and affordable." One wonders whether he just realized this.
An expansion of health savings accounts means different things to different observers. Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, told the LA Times, "We may be looking at the start of a fundamental shift in what we mean by health insurance, from a system where we share risks to one where it's up to individuals to make their own deals and bear their own risks."
This week Minnesota Public Radio presents a week-long series on health savings accounts and so-called "consumer-driven health care." (I am interviewed in one of the segments).
It's going to be hard for the insurance, pharmaceutical, medical, and legislative monopoly to hold onto the facade that they provide the right approach to health care, esp since their system has vaulted MDs into the leading cause of death (See "Death by Medicine" by Gary Null et al online). 900,000 are unnecessarily dead each year from this system; that's over 2400 a day (Iraq is 2.1 US soldiers dead per day). Null's study is not the only one that exposes medical-performance shortcomings (See JAMA Vol 279(15) p1200 and the Barbara Starfield, MD, study in JAMA 2000. Or you could just read "Who's Representing the Healthy? by me and get all those studies in one place.)
As a CEO on Ron Insana's CNBC roundtable discussion pointed out recently, "At the bottom line, we need fewer people going to doctors, if we plan to control costs." That means having healthier people. What motivates people to be healthy? Does free insurance provide motivation? Such an approach is more likely to produce a tax increase to pay for the "free" insurance.
Rather than resort to socialism to attempt to repair our health-care problems, it might be worth asking if our current system provides incentives for good performance or disincentives for poor performance. It doesn't; everbody in the group pays the same premium. Group-health plans dump the poor-performance cost overruns onto the employer, the government and worst of all, onto the healthy policyholders, who pay a large portion of the premiums for those who fail to maintain their own bodies. Who is that motivating, and why do we punish our top performers?
Capitalism can fix the health-care problem by offering healthy people their own insurance. Such a plan will drive costs up for poor performers who will be encouraged to get healthier to acheive lower premiums. Such a plan is akin to pay-for-performance. Imagine the effort people might make if their premium was linked to their measured state of health.
Corporations can go one step further by training and assisting their employees to learn and perform to higher standards.
Best regards,
Dr. Thomas N. Campbell, DC
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Andrea Jasperson
http://www.grouphealthinsurancecheap.com