The Quandary of Health Care Reform
Matt All, General Counsel for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas, spoke to the Topeka Rotary Club and helped explain both the requirements of the law along with what he expects to happen once the act is fully implemented.
All defined these core issue as the rise in health care
costs at an unsustainable rate year after year, which has created the most important
domestic issue of our time.
“The costs of health care are rising faster than the costs
of other things in our economy and it is consuming more and more of our
economy,” All said. “We spend twice as
much on health care as any other country in the world and our health outcomes
aren’t any better.”
As a budget item for both businesses and families, All said
that the rising costs of health care are crowding out other goods and services
they might otherwise consume with those dollars. He said that families were not taking home
any more money in 2008 than they were taking home in 2000, which is unusual in
modern American history.
“For each employer it also cost twenty-five percent more to
hire a person in 2008 than it did in 2000 as well,” All said. “That difference went to health care. This is crowding out other things like
research and development for businesses.”
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the costs of
health insurance premiums more than doubled from 1999 to 2009, both to the
costs to employers and to the employees contribution. In 1960, the United States spent 5.2 percent of
its economy on health care and in 2009 it spent 17.6 percent.
“The bottom fifty-percent of health care consumers spend
only 3.1% of our national health care expenditure. The top one-percent of health care consumers
spend one-fifth of our national health care expenditure,” said All. “This is a heavily concentrated expenditure
on very expensive types of healthcare.”
All said the fee-for-service system has contributed to the
rising costs of health care. Providers,
he suggests, are buying very expensive equipment and then passing those costs along
as they are competing for patients.
“The problem is that once you do that, you have to pay for that eqipment and you pay for it while driving the volume of patients through,” he said. “But our own health care decisions are driving this as well. We think we benefit from more and more expensive care. But the data doesn’t really bear this out.”
You can watch the video of our meeting by viewing this story on our website.