Almost everyone agrees that healthcare prices are too high, and that patients too often face nightmare scenarios with opaque billing practices and inexplicable costs. Prof. Charles Silver has been studying inefficient and unethical healthcare schemes for decades, and in dozens of scholarly articles and books, including Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much For Health Care, co-written with Georgetown Law’s David A. Hyman.
In this new piece for The Academic Minute, Silver explains his idea: put consumers, not the government, in charge of health care spending.
The Academic Minute, a nationally syndicated program run by NPR’s WAMC and sponsored by Inside Higher Ed and the American Association of Colleges and Universities, recently featured Charles Silver, the Roy W. and Eugenia C. McDonald Endowed Chair in Civil Procedure .
Put Consumers in Charge of Health Care
America’s health care system costs too much, delivers too little, and can be a nightmare for patients.
These problems exist because Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers pay patients’ bills, and their interests differ greatly from those of consumers.
The solution is to put consumers in charge. To accomplish that, my research indicates that Medicare and Medicaid should work like Social Security does. They should give people money and let them decide how to spend it.
This change would convert 149 million Medicare and Medicaid recipients into an army of price- and quality-conscious consumers with $1.8 trillion to spend.
The effects would be both immediate and hugely beneficial. Providers would advertise their prices Instead of hiding them, and they’d compete on both price and quality, neither of which they currently do.
Surprise bills and phony charges, like facility fees, would vanish.
Prior authorization requirements would also disappear.
So would fraud, which costs Medicare and Medicaid hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Consumers spending their own money won’t pay phony bills.
Health care providers would benefit. They could charge market rates and be paid for services immediately, just like other businesses.
But inefficient providers—those whose services don’t work or cost more than they are worth—will be unhappy. They’ll have to do better or close their doors.
If we give consumers control of the dollars that pay health care providers’ bills, the American health care system will quickly become more consumer-friendly. If we don’t, we’ll have to put up with the existing, consumer-hostile system indefinitely.
Original source can be found here.