As the next act of the Massachusetts health care drama plays out on Beacon Hill, the same characters return to the stage with a tired script. The ostensible hero of the production, the patient, is left to watch the tragedy from the back row.
Legislation being debated on Beacon Hill ignores patient-centered health plans and health savings accounts, or HSAs, which are lower-premium insurance plans that direct pre-tax dollars into a bank account to cover an individual’s current health care and save money for future medical expenses. An HSA is the most direct way to engage patients in the health system. They cover out-of-pocket medical, dental, and vision expenses, are fully portable, and owned by individuals for their entire lives.
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Talk about tired solutions. HSAs are a way to cost shift expenses to ill people at a time when they can little afford it. Average savings for Americans and probably less during this recession is around the $5000 dollar mark. This leaves little room for economic security if illness strikes. Plans like this can be touted because 20% of the population in any year is the source of 80% of the expenses. People just think it won't happen to them and grab onto the cheapest plans. However people move in and out of this vulnerable group and eventually all of us will require care that is expensive. While awaiting that fate the health care system must stand ready to deliver. For that to happen and to keep costs down all who can should pay into the system to ensure it will be in gear when it is needed. We don't need Wall St schemes like HSAs that are shell games, hiding looming disaster until you get sick. The choice is clear. Either we have insurance that gives peace of mind because it avails us of treatment when our health falters or we continue to play roulette with our well being. We already have 45,000 excess deaths a year and medical illness bankruptcy making up 60% of bankruptcy because of poor or non existant insurance plans.
"These estimates understate long-term savings; as patients become savvy consumers and providers compete on price and quality" - Nice use of buzzwords. Please define "quality" are you referring to the 55 or so indicators that are used to declare "quality" over the entire spectrum of health care? Are you saying that how quickly you receive an aspirin when you come to the ER complaining of chest pain means the facility will deliver "quality" care in oncology? "Savvy consumers"-You are in motor vehicles accident, they are cutting you out of your car and you have sustained multiple trauma. Please explain how you will act as a "savvy consumer"? You have cancer please explain the actions of tyrosine kinase inhibitors and how they might be used to treat your cancer? You will need this knowledge to be a "savvy consumer". Healthcare is not like buying a car. Quality is very difficult to define across thousands of diagnosis. Unless you decide to devote several years to studying, anatomy, physiology, microbiology, pharmacology, surgery and medicine you can not be a "savvy consumer".
Single-payer is proven to reduce the cost of health care. The only system that is proven to reduce it and cover everyone fairly.
The "Pioneer Institute" is funded by conservatives, but calls itself non-partisan.
Josh Archambault's analysis is worthy of front page coverage and in this case it is too bad that opinion pieces don't get printed on the front page. Most Globe editors don't rate front page coverage, but this analysis is one of the best printed in the Globe in a very long while.
"Patient-centered health care" sounds very much like one of those deceptive Republican slogans. You sing its praises and give a single corporate example, but you don't explain how the way it works makes it better overall, and exactly how it saves money. Catch phrases and generalities do not a case make. Nothing's as perfect as you claim, so what's the down side? What are possible unintended consequences? People seem to always be coming up with simplistic solutions to complicated problems.