FixHealthCarePolicy

Principles for Effective Health Reform

Last week we analyzed the pitfalls of the Democrats regulation-heavy approach to health insurance market reform, an agenda that is being sold as offering consumer protections.

There is a better way to frame health insurance markets. Edmund F. Haislmaier outlines a promising approach in “Health Care Reform: Design Principles for a Patient-Centered, Consumer-Based Market.” Haislmaier first identifies problems in the current health care system:

“For all the benefits that it provides in helping people to live longer and healthier lives, America’s health care system seems too costly, confusing, inefficient, and uneven in its results, and it leaves too many people without adequate access to its benefits. Fundamentally, Americans as individuals and as a society intuitively recognize that the present health system could do a much better job of delivering value.”

He then presents six principles that policymakers would do well to follow to address these problems:
1. Individuals are the key decision makers in the health care system.
2. Individuals buy and own their own health insurance coverage.
3. Individuals choose their own health insurance coverage.
4. Individuals have a wide range of coverage choices.
5. Prices are transparent.
6. Individuals have the periodic opportunity to change health coverage.

Haislmaier’s approach would lead to meaningful competition. His principles would redirect incentives towards the efficient provision of high-quality care. As Haislmaier explains:

“… a value-maximizing result can be achieved in health care only if the system is restructured to make the consumer the key decision maker. When individual consumers decide how the money is spent, either directly for medical care or indirectly through their health insurance choices, the incentives will be aligned throughout the system to generate better value in other words, to produce more for less.”

Tags: consumer based, health reform, insurance market, patient centered