Philip Moeller Shares How The Coronavirus Exposed US Healthcare

U.S. health care costs roughly twice as much per person as it does in other developed nations, but ranks near the bottom in quality measures. Philip Moeller, journalist and author of "Get What's Yours for Health Care: How to Get the Best Care at the Right Price" (available now from Simon & Schuster, a ViacomCBS company), cautions against losing sight of the fact that our national health care spending is wildly out of control. And though the coronavirus pandemic exposed many of the system's shortcomings, major health care reform seems unlikely in the face of a deeply divided government and the entrenched interests of for-profit health providers. Read more in his original piece below.

It is no exaggeration to say that health care has never occupied such a central place in our minds. COVID-19 is taking record numbers of lives in the U.S. even as remarkable progress is being achieved on promising vaccines that could provide herd immunity, assuming enough people take them.

Beyond trying to control this devastating disease, the future of the Affordable Care Act – and continued health insurance for 20 million people–is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Health reform is also back on the front burner as [President] Joe Biden takes office.

Lost in the flurry of Defcon 1 health emergencies is the ongoing damage being done to our economy and wallets by health costs that are twice as large in the U.S. per person as in other developed nations.

Even as the economy tanked earlier this year, health spending soldiered on. Total spending for the year may dip because of drops in routine care, preventive screenings, and elective surgeries. But the decline could be as little as half a percent.

"We have never seen a year in which health spending actually goes down," commented Drew Altman, head of the Kaiser Family Foundation. "It may be a long time before we see a reduction in health spending like this again."

Once the pandemic is under control, we will still be saddled with a national health care bill of more than $3.8 trillion. Imagine what we could do with half of that money—an extra $1.9 trillion each and every year—either keeping it in our own pockets or using it to address climate change, aging infrastructure needs, or a host of other needs.

Wishing we could save health dollars won't make it happen, of course. Neither will even the most aggressive single-payer health reform proposal, not that it has a glimmer of being approved by Congress.

Beyond policy issues, a lot of those $3.8 trillion dollars wind up as the salaries of nurses, doctors, and other health care workers. Who would want to reduce their paychecks these days, if ever? They are the heroic human faces of health care. But they also are part of an entrenched network of highly profitable and often noncompetitive health care giants—insurance, drug, equipment, hospital, and physician companies.

Despite this spending, analyses by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) regularly place the U.S. in the bottom third of important health outcomes among developed nations.

In 1970, consumers directly paid 34 percent of national health expenses out of their own pockets, according to an analysis from the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.  By 2018, people were paying only 10 percent of health expenses directly. Over the same period, the share of national spending shifted to private and public health insurance plans rose to 75 percent from 43 percent.

Shifting health spending away from consumers has had multiple and mostly bad consequences. Consumers no longer pay their own health bills and have little if any idea what providers charge for health services or whether such charges bear any resemblance to underlying costs. Why should they even care, given that these costs have little bearing on their own out-of-pocket spending?

This disconnect also causes people to use more health care than they need, often stimulated by commercial health advertising unique to the planet. Private enterprise is supposed to bring competition, lower prices, and improved quality. It fails on all three counts in health care.

With insurers and Uncle Sam legally responsible for paying covered services, health care companies have little reason to favor quality of care over quantity. More care, whether clinically appropriate or not, translates into higher profits for shareholders.

Health reform proposals, which will face high hurdles in Washington, largely deal with expanding coverage and not lowering prices. Even aggressive proposals to cut drug prices would barely move the needle on total health costs.

If the excesses wrought by our health oligopolies are one facet of how capitalism works, these inefficiencies also are giving rise to another: disruptive new health companies. There is so much money and waste in U.S. health care that new entrants are drawn to the industry like bees to honey, seeing the chance to deliver better and lower-cost health solutions and still make enormous profits.

Walmart, CVS, Amazon, Apple, Google, and others are building large, consumer-facing health businesses that provide convenience and lower prices, often accompanied by publicly posted price lists. Over time, demand for health care will shift to these lower-cost providers.

But make no mistake. We've lost the larger war on health costs and are settling instead for endless skirmishes seeking only cost containment. Victory will be declared when health inflation is comparable to overall price increases in the economy. Huzzah.

This is an original article by Philip Moeller

Veteran journalist Philip Moeller has won a Gerald Loeb award for distinguished business and financial journalism. He coauthored the New York Times bestseller Get What's Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security and is the author of the companion volumes, Get What's Yours for Medicare: Maximizing Your Coverage, Minimizing Your Costs and Get What's Yours for Health Care: How to Get the Best Care at the Right Price. He wrote the "Ask Phil" feature for PBS NewsHour and has also worked for Money and US News & Report as well as several newspapers.