Our Wall-Street Run Health Care

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There are quite a few ways to explain what is causing our health care and health insurance costs to skyrocket, but in terms of crude political terms, there are really only two possibilities: either health care costs are skyrocketing because the government is involved in a major way – with Medicare, Medicaid, the prescription drug benefit, the subsidy for employer-based coverage, etc.; or the market for health care and health insurance is inefficient independent of government interference.

I don’t have the expertise to resolve the issue – but to me it is telling that the costs of health care and health insurance began to rise exponentially not shortly after Medicare and Medicaid were begun, but during the early years of the Reagan administration with his derogatory fervor. Then the medical loss ratio began to decrease – as health insurance companies began to squeeze as much profit as they could from their businesses. In other words, the prices for health care and health insurance began to rise precipitously as Wall Street began to take a more assertive role in running the economy including health insurance. At the same time, the costs of government insurance has risen slower than that of private insurance companies.

Economists long ago discovered that health care markets are not efficient on their own – as most individuals do not treat health care as a typical service. Rather if people have a choice, they avoid using the service until they absolutely need it – and then are willing to pay whatever is necessary to get better. This also is demonstrated by the fact that despite the fact that America spends far more on health insurance than nations with similar health care systems, statistics show our overall level of care is generally lower than in these countries (fewer doctors per patient; a lower life expectancy; etcetera). At the same time, most individuals treat some level of health care as a right. Even right-wingers – as they decry the attempts to make health care a right in America – implicitly treat it as one when they tell the anecdotes about the 21-year old alcoholic who was denied a liver transplant under Britain’s system because the bureaucracy in place required him to prove he would not endanger his new liver. But unless getting medical treatment to extend this young man’s life is a right, why would anyone be outraged over it?

Because of these various factors, health care operates as an inefficient market as demand does not appreciably respond to changes in price. This helps explain how the health insurance industry began to fall under the sway of Wall Street and take on the telltale characteristics of a Wall Street-run corporation that exists primarily to generate exorbitant profits instead of to provide a service or product. When Wall Street focuses on an indursty, there follows certain predictable steps:

• as a precondition, there needs to be a market inefficiency that Wall Street can exploit; for example, the inflexibility of demand for a product or service allows the creation of a rapidly inflating bubble in costs;
• the pay of top corporation executives rises exponentially above that of most employees;
• increasingly, these executives began to make decisions that benefit their shareholders in the short-term so as to maximize their paychecks and keep their jobs;
• the product or service is degraded as corporations turn their focus to creating mass short-term profits;
• the inefficiences present initially are exacerbated;
• most important, many major risks and costs are deliberately externalized to the public so as to maximize private profits;
• at some point, this becomes unsustainable and the bubble bursts.

This is exactly what we saw in Exxon’s massive profits during the surge in oil prices in 2008; and it is very similar to what we saw in the housing market; and it is also clearly what we have seen with health care in America for the past twenty to thirty years as the inflation in health care costs far outpaced all else.

I actually don’t like the idea of blaming everything on Wall Street – but the telltale signs are here:

• health care demand is generally inflexible, although when costs are paid can be shifted as most people see health care as a right and medical facilities and doctors swear an oath to provide care to everyone;
• health insurance companies – rather than maintaining their large dollar profits as prices skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s instead began to increase their percentage of the profit – as a Wall Street-run company always does, thus exacerbating the inefficiencies already present;
• rather than seeking to reduce the costs of care while providing the best service possible, they sought to exclude as many sick individuals as possible and to cancel coverage for as many individuals who got sick as possible and to use other means of artificially lowering their costs without lowering the price of their service;
• by refusing to pay for so many sick individuals, many of these costs are externalized to the public; by refusing to cover those who have preexisting conditions – and thus those who are more likely to need to use health care resources – the costs of taking care of these individuals is put upon hospitals and the public; while doing all of this, the insurance industry sought greater and greater government subsidies.

The toxic effect of this inflating cost bubble coupled with the attempts to externalize as many costs as possible have created the twin problems of a growing number of uninsured Americans and rapidly growing federal deficit fueled almost entirely by health care costs.

This is the status quo that we need to change. As Steven Pearlstein explained:

Among the range of options for health-care reform, there’s one that is sure to raise your taxes, increase your out-of-pocket medical expenses, swell the federal deficit, leave more Americans without insurance and guarantee that wages will remain stagnant.

That’s the option of doing nothing…

Doing nothing means leaving our Wall Street-run health care in place; and while right-wing critics focus on the specter of rationing by government bureaucrats and government bureaucrats in between you and your doctor and complain about the complex system the Democrats are proposing – they fail to acknowledge that this Wall Street-run health care rations care by cost and interjects bureaucrats reporting to CEOs imbued with the culture and ethos of Wall Street as they attempt to exploit every inefficiency in our current extremely complex system as much as possible, externalizing as much cost to the public as they can.

If the problem with our current system is not that the government is too involved – as right-wingers assert – but that the market is inefficient in providing health care – and that these inefficiencies are being exploited by Wall Street-run health insurance companies – and if with the economy still fragile from the bursting of the bubble in home prices and with radical changes not feasible or desired – then you turn to the various plans that the Obama administration and Democratic Congress are looking at which attempt to introduce various processes and incentives that will gradually shape the health care system into a more rational market – creating regulated markets for individuals to buy health insurance; eliminating abusive practices that artificially decrease medical costs for insurance companies; creating a public option to compete with these private companies; empowering an independent body (MedPAC) to regulate Medicare prices and practices; creating a body to look at and disseminate information on the comparative effectiveness of treatments and medicines.

It’s clear that our Wall Street-run health care industry isn’t working. More of the same – more deregulation as the Republicans propose – isn’t going to fix this problem. We need change. We need to take back our health care from Wall Street and make it responsive to consumers again. Our system won’t be perfect – and it won’t happen overnight – but the Democrats are clearly working to reform this system. The Republicans are merely seeking to obstruct.