You Can Limit Our Deductibles, but it Won’t Reduce Our Health Care Bills

When the Obama administration recently delayed its mandate on out-of-pocket health costs, experts and politicians started debating whether this delay affects our longer-term ability to implement Obamacare. I don’t think it does, but I also think we’re missing the bigger point. Once again, the United States is facing the total disconnect between our nation’s health care policies (whether Obamacare, Ryancare, or “your favored politician’s name here”-care) and the simple, unavoidable arithmetic of health care costs.

Let’s examine the latest example. Obamacare includes a mandate on insurers that out-of-pocket health care costs cannot exceed $6,350 for an individual or $12,700 for a family, numbers often cited as “catastrophic.” At first glance, these limits may sound high: six or twelve thousand dollars is a sizeable expense. But consider: households spend an average of $23,000 a year on health care. If it is considered catastrophic to ask some households to pay $12,000 in out-of-pocket expenses, then how can—or, more accurately, how do—all households cover costs that average almost twice as much?

A similar mathematical conundrum is playing out in another part of Obamacare. Congress determined that we shouldn’t have to pay more than 9 or 10 percent of our income for a moderately comprehensive health policy in the new health exchanges. But
consider: health costs now average about one-fifth of personal income and one-third
of money income. So how do we cover the difference?

The simple answer is that if we don’t pay in one way, we pay in another. Mandate any new limit on what consumers have to pay directly—on out-of-pocket deductibles, Medicare co-payment rates, drug costs under the Part D legislation pushed by President George W. Bush, or our share of the cost of health insurance in President Obama’s new health care exchanges—and those expenses don’t simply disappear. They just get tacked on somewhere else.

Of course, I’m only talking about averages. So you might object, “Well, at least I’m not the one who pays.” Perhaps true, but not as much as you might think.

Perhaps you are fairly healthy and have lower health needs. Insurance policies, however, shift costs from the unhealthy to the healthy. That’s as it should be, but the cost of insurance adds to any out-of-pocket cost. Moreover, since unhealthy households tend to have lower incomes to start with, and on average probably can’t cover even average costs of $23,000, healthy households probably pay at least that average amount and probably more to cover the income shortfalls from the less healthy. So being healthy doesn’t let us off the hook.

Perhaps you are middle class or even poor. The government’s health policies redistribute costs from those with higher incomes to those with lower incomes, including the retired. We might think that we avoid paying these high health costs by shifting tax burdens to the rich. Unfortunately, government health costs are already so high that the middle class has to share in the burden of paying for them.

More importantly, even if those health costs could be placed entirely on the rich, the rest of us would still pay what are called opportunity costs. When our elected officials require that a tax be spent on health care, they simultaneously decide that it can’t be spent on education or training or highways or other goods and services. The decline in education spending in recent years while health costs continued to rise provides only the latest piece of evidence.

Regardless of cost shifts to the healthy and those with higher incomes, we still pay a lot ourselves, only indirectly. In particular, we pay through lower cash wages when employers purchase health insurance, an important but often ignored aspect of the slow growth in cash compensation for over three decades. We also pay a decent amount through our own taxes, including federal income and Medicare taxes and all those state excise and sales taxes, often on businesses, that get passed onto us in the form of higher prices on what we buy. Finally, we pay a lot by borrowing from China, Japan, oil-exporting countries, and, more recently, the Federal Reserve, and then passing those outstanding balances and interest payments to our children.

And if paying a lot isn’t bad enough, these methods of paying help insure that we don’t always get our money’s worth. There’s fairly clear evidence that for every $100 of costs pushed into indirect and hidden budgets, our costs rise by more than $100 as health care providers find it easier to raise their prices.

So, the next time someone tells you that we can’t afford health costs that are only a fraction of what we actually pay, ask him where he thinks the extra money comes from.


2 Comments on “You Can Limit Our Deductibles, but it Won’t Reduce Our Health Care Bills”

  1. Dave Flynn says:

    Gene – good food for thought.

  2. I totally agree and this won’t change until we find a way to match someone with the ability to pay for worker and retiree healthcare with the ability to control costs. The government finds this problematic and individuals don’t have the resources. This leaves employers. If we funded health care with a hidden consumption tax – a VAT-like net business receipts tax we could allow them to offset health care provided directly to employees and retirees and their families. They could use either third party insurance or hire their own medical staffs and facilities. In the latter case, malpractice would be punished by employee disciplinary procedures rather than malpractice insurance – and damages would be cleared by the employer. If employers largely do this, retiree and employee healthcare will come off the public books. Smaller employers will likely not take these breaks, pay the tax and have the government cover retirees while employees participate in the health insurance exchanges or a public option. Note that if this option is taken, the tax credit cannot be fully available to firms who shed the obligation to fund legacy employees through bankruptcy.


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