Obama reportedly told all “his people” to read this New Yorker article. Swamp Report agrees that this article should be read by everyone. The basic assertion of the article is that high health care costs in America are driven by doctors’ (and to a lessor extent insurance companies’) greed, not law suits. While the Mayo Clinic’s approach (see page 6) appears to be effective in reducing costs if the approach is universally applied through government control, it is clearly socialism:
The core tenet of the Mayo Clinic is “The needs of the patient come first”—not the convenience of the doctors, not their revenues. The doctors and nurses, and even the janitors, sat in meetings almost weekly, working on ideas to make the service and the care better, not to get more money out of patients. I asked Cortese how the Mayo Clinic made this possible.
“It’s not easy,” he said. But decades ago Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. Mayo promoted leaders who focussed first on what was best for patients, and then on how to make this financially possible.
However, without taking sides with the doctors or other analysts, Swamp Report would like to add to the mix: More competition is at least part of the answer. And… we mean private -not government subsidized- competition. Clearly, restricting the number of (supply of) doctors raises doctors’ incomes and even encourages them to expect more each year. A comparison of 2008 matriculation data (18036 matriculants) to 2003 (16538 matriculants) and an examiniation of applications, shows the intentional restrictions. What would a doubling of the Med school matriculation rate for the next ten years in the US do to the availability of cost efficient health care here? And please don’t tell us there aren’t enough qualified applicants… Restricting the supply of workers in ANY field (the purpose of unions) raises wages to the lucky few who are admitted to the club.
More competition by private insurers will also go a long way to reducing costs. But creating a subsidized government run organization to “compete” with private companies will only reduce the number of competing private firms…and thus drive up costs. We need more not less.
Of course adding to the supply without giving the patient an incentive to shop around would be a mistake. We also need the patient to bear a larger percentage of the cost – so they have a vested interest in keeping costs down by comparing costs.
