Tuesday, June 07, 2005
WSJ offers reality check on health care "leadership"
[Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., "O Health-Care Leader, Where Art Thou?," The Wall Street Journal, 1 June 2005.]
Should we rely on government as the source of innovation and leadership in health care? Columnist Holman Jenkins takes issue with the idea that anyone but business leaders can provide the impetus for change:
[B]usiness has always taken the lead in addressing the country's health-care woes -- as it must, given the irrelevance of most punditry and political posturing on the subject.
Right now, cost increases are slowing again -- the Bureau of Labor Statistics says they're up only 7.5% in the last 12 months, compared 11.4% in 2002. Business can take a bow for this result. In just the last year, the number of large firms offering or planning to offer "health savings accounts" to their workers nearly doubled, from 14% to 26%.
These allow insurance to get back to its classic role of paying for "catastrophic" medical bills while consumers save tax-free to cover routine medical costs and small emergencies. The idea is not, as some headline writers put it, to "shift costs" from employers to employees -- employees would be kidding themselves to believe they don't pay for their own health care however the bill is served up. But it does introduce an incentive to spend health dollars more wisely.
To champions of health-care reform, this progress is effortlessly ignored... This blind spot can be described succinctly: a policy that doesn't lead to more direct government spending on health care is no policy at all.
A dozen states have woken up and begun backing down from mandates that specified in detail what treatments and procedures insurance must cover, driving the cost of available policies out of sight.
[H]ealth-care "reformers" have spent 30 years touting their wares without finding the courage to tackle the tax code. Until they do, business will have no choice but to provide default leadership in coping with the central malady of our health-care economy.
[Matthew Hisrich, "HSAs are increasing Americans' health coverage," The Topeka Capital-Journal, 26 September 2004.]
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