As you listen to all the rhetoric surrounding health-care reform, Fortune magazine’s Geoff Colvin offers some good advice that exposes three major myths associated with reform.
First, rising health-care costs are not a problem in and of themselves. The problem lies in the waste and inefficiency that ensure we don’t get our money’s worth when costs rise.
Second, the fee-for-service system is not a major part of the problem. The problem is:
[W]e aren’t paying with our own money. Only 12% of U.S. health-care spending is out-of-pocket, a proportion that has been falling for decades. If each of us controlled more of the money that’s being spent on our behalf for health care, we can be certain it would be spent more carefully, on services directly or on insurance that covers those services. Don’t let reform partisans tell you how they’d eliminate fee-for-service; make them tell you how they’d let consumers direct more of their own health-care spending.
Hmm. Consumer-driven health care? That sounds familiar.
The third myth is that a well-designed government plan (oxymoron?) can avoid rationing:
The Obama administration has stated flatly that “health care will not be rationed” under its plan. So let’s be clear on this: Health care will be rationed. It must be. To say otherwise is to say the government can supply it in unlimited quantities to everyone. This point is so obvious it should not be controversial. ?
