Healthcare reform

President Obama and Congressional bigwigs are talking at each other today on the subject of healthcare reform. Arnold Kling offers a good summary of why they are wasting their time:

There are two ways to approach reducing the use of high-cost, low-benefit procedures. You can have the government tell people what they can and cannot have. Or you can have individuals pay for a larger fraction of the medical procedures that they consume. It really comes down to those choices.

Advocating either one of those is political suicide, and talking about anything else is a waste of time. The Democrats will not advocate government rationing, and the Republicans will not advocate scrapping most of our current system of third-party payment in medicine. Instead, the summit, like the entire "health reform debate" this year, will be a waste of time.

On a more positive note, the WSJ today has a good article by Cogan, Hubbard and Kessler that lays out a simple and easy-to-implement plan that would go a long way toward improving our healthcare system. Here are the key points:

To bring down costs, we need to change the incentives that govern spending. Right now, $5 out of every $6 of health-care spending is paid for by someone other than the person receiving care—insurance companies, employers, or the government. Individuals are insulated from the reality of what their decisions cost. This breeds overutilization of low-value health care and runaway spending.

To reduce the growth of costs, individuals must take greater responsibility for their health care, and health insurers and health-care providers must face the competitive forces of the market. Three policy changes will go a long way to achieving these objectives: (1) eliminate the tax code's bias that favors health insurance over out-of-pocket spending; (2) remove state-government barriers to purchasing and providing health services; and (3) reform medical malpractice laws.

The tax code's favorable treatment of employer-sponsored health insurance over out-of-pocket health-care payments means that, for most families, buying health care through an employer is 30%-40% cheaper than buying it directly. The best way to address this clear bias is by making all health spending—including out-of-pocket payments, purchases of individual insurance, and purchases of COBRA coverage—tax-deductible.

There are two additional steps to reforming private insurance markets. First, individuals must be allowed to buy health insurance offered in states other than those in which they live. The current approach of state-by-state regulation has raised costs by reducing competition among insurance companies. It has also allowed state legislatures to impose insurance mandates that raise prices, while preventing residents from getting policies more suitable for their needs.

Second, reasonable caps on damages for pain and suffering need to be established in medical malpractice cases. Caps on these kind of damages reduce costs and decrease unnecessary, defensive medicine.

These three policies ... fundamentally change incentives among individuals, insurers, and providers to gradually slow the growth in costs by reducing inefficient demand without sacrificing quality and innovation. Instead of radically changing health care overnight, they take an incremental approach, respecting the tremendous uncertainty surrounding the effectiveness of different approaches to rein in costs.