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No, Single-Payer Reforms Won't Curb Hospital Costs
[National Review] Reforms that eliminate barriers to hospital competition are a much smarter option.Charles Blahous of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just demonstrated the perils of making generous assumptions for the sake of proving a narrow point. In an attempt to quantify the rough fiscal impact associated with having the federal government take up all health-care costs currently borne by private insurers, employers, and individuals, Blahous accepted the assumption made by Senator Bernie Sanders and other single-payer proponents that the reform could save billions by purchasing services from hospitals at Medicare rates. Although Blahous’s study estimated that Sanders’s "Medicare for All" proposal would impose a fiscal burden of $32 trillion (yes, trillion) over ten years and a likely annual tax increase of $26,000 per American household, single-payer advocates have been thrilled by its publication, seizing on its comparison between the estimated cost and expected private health-insurance spending over that ten-year period to argue that it would actually save Americans $2 trillion. This "finding" is merely the result of a preposterous assumption: that because Medicare currently pays 40 percent less than private insurers for hospital services, the cost of delivering hospital services to the privately insured could be proportionately reduced simply by having the government rather than insurers pay hospitals for them. Posted by: Besoeker 2018-08-01 |
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