Different This Time?

The good news is that President Obama hasn't let the current economic situation make him lose sight of the imminent need for health care reforms. The question is whether he has the resolve and insight to push the most important ones through.

The health care forum kicked off by him on March 5 has generally been well received. News commentators and political pundits have contrasted the atmosphere of open discussion and hearing of all the interest groups with the behind-closed-doors formulation of the ill-fated 1993 Clinton plan. How well the new approach works depends partly on how the working group discussions have been structured, and whether all the ideas could be aired and properly debated.

In these open discussions there are hopefully safeguards to ensure that special interests can't through mutual compromises squelch good ideas that adversely affect them. For example, payers and patients stand to enormously benefit from an increased supply of doctors; a properly designed public health insurance plan that fairly competes with private plans; reform of tort laws including restrictions on jury shopping and imposition of malpractice caps; and using a cost-benefit criteria to evaluate drugs. But these measures can reduce excess earnings of doctors, private insurers, trial lawyers and the drug companies respectively. So they all decide to "respect" each other and downplay such proposals.

Another danger in open discussions is the advance warning and preemptive opportunities available to special interests and the lawmakers that they have influenced or bought. Five senior Republican senators have already affirmed their GOP group's opposition to the public option, declaring, "..forcing free market plans to compete with these government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition... Ultimately we would be left with a single government-run program controlling all of the market.”

Huh? If private plans are more efficient and / or offer something better than the government program then why should they be wiped out? I don't much doubt the prediction, since the experience in France and Germany indicates that about 80%-90% of the people will go for the basic government plan (though 90% of the French also buy supplemental private insurance.) It's because a properly administered government -run plan can deliver better value than private profit-seeking entities, but then that's a sound reason to change the system. Note the "properly administered" qualifier - Paul Krugman repeatedly points out the success story of the government run Veteran's Health Administration in the Clinton years. Then services deteriorated and scandals like at Walter Reed emerged in the subsequent Bush era.

On this issue of public programs it is a little disturbing to see Obama appearing less than resolute and making conciliatory noises at the outset. He says he understands the objections because "...if a public option is run through Washington and there are incentives to try to tamp down costs, (then) private insurance plans might end up feeling overwhelmed.” Why? A March 12 item by Reuters quotes conservative experts who assert it will be "almost impossible to create a level playing field (between a public and private insurers)" but give no reason to support this.

Still, there are two encouraging aspects that makes the present reform thrust much more likely to succeed than the 1993 effort (other than the over-hyped closed-door versus open-door contrast):
a) A sadder, wiser, more anxious public is less likely to be taken in by those Harry and Louise ads. And a more dire health care situation has made the push for reforms much stronger.
b) Obama has rightly focused on the very high costs of US health care as an even bigger issue than extending coverage to all the uninsured. That should force participants to come up with solutions for more efficient and cost-effective health care, instead of simply shoveling more taxpayer dollars to outrageously priced providers.