The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle writes the following:
“Substantial savings might be generated with a version of Britain's NICE, which could use CER to set global policies on coverage. But merely making the information available has virtually no effect. If we can't expect heartless private insurers to deploy CER in the name of cost control, how can we hope that our government will do so in the face of the inevitable backlash from angry voters who swear that their toe surgery changed their life?”
Her sarcasm not withstanding, McArdle makes an excellent point.
While most insurance companies would enthusiastically welcome comparative effectiveness guidelines put forth by the federal government, insurers have been reluctant to exercise measures of cost control of that type because they are responding to the wishes of their customer base.
In other words, no single insurer is willing to take these steps and engender an exodus of clients to a competitor. And, ironically, those on the political Left who support a government takeover of health care make two common contradictory arguments: People with insurance are under-insured and private insurers are mainly responsible for the high cost of health care in this country.
As most people know by now, Medicare ranked # 1 in 2008 on the list of insurers with the most claim denials. For all we know, the majority of those claims were legitimate and denied solely for cost-control reasons.
Even so, Medicare still wastes $60 billion a year on account of fraud. Jeffrey Anderson of The Weekly Standard determined that amount far exceeds the ill-gotten 2008 profits of the ten largest insurance companies in the country.
So who really deserves blame for the high cost of health care in this country? It would seem the usual suspects object to insurers not exercising more cost control (increased claim denials) while simultaneously using the popular argument that people are under-insured by those avaricious insurance companies.
Confused? Don’t be surprised. This entire national debate on health care is chock-full of contradictory arguments emanating from the Big Government crowd.
The bad news is it appears this debate will continue for at least a couple more months. Hang in there.
