Philadelphia Reflections

The musings of a physician who has served the community for over six decades

Related Topics

Reflections on Impending Obamacare
Reform was surely needed to remove distortions imposed on medical care by its financing. The next big questions are what the Affordable Care Act really reforms; and, whether the result will be affordable for the whole nation. Here are some proposals, just in case.

Obamacare: Examination and Response
An appraisal of the Affordable Care Act and-- with some guesswork-- its tricky politics. Then, a way to capture major new revenue, even paying down existing Medicare debt, without raising premiums or harming quality care. Then, an offering of reforms even more basic, but more incremental. Finally, the briefest of statements about the basic premise.

Obamacare Follies, Executive Summary
Obamacare needs simple explanation

Health Savings Accounts, Regular, and Lifetime
We explain the distinction between Health Savings Accounts, Flexible Spending Accounts, and Lifetime Health Savings Accounts. Sometimes abbreviated as HSA, FSA, and L-HSA. Congress should make it easier to switch between them. All three are superior to "pay as you go", health insurance now in common use, only slightly modified by Obamacare. It's like term life insurance compared to whole-life. (www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/262.htm)

Cost Shifting, Reconsidered

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Cost-shifting is a necessary accounting evil, without which no large organization could survive. Confusingly large amounts of it, however, undermine trust in the leadership. More specific criticism of current healthcare leadership is its reliance on moralizing rather than an apology. That is a sure sign that oppressors (i.e. insurance and government) made it necessary, and suggests that leadership is toadying to them.

Since managers have no choice but to engage in cost-shifting, it seems better to cost-shift with some hope of repayment. By switching to lifetime health insurance to replace the one-year version, many more opportunities can be developed for repaying the older individual what had been "borrowed" from him as a youth. Even without the notion of paying interest on the loan with investment proceeds, it seems more comfortable to seek loan forgiveness from yourself at a later stage of life, if that proves the necessary insurance metaphor.

The proposal to revise insurance architecture also contains a transfer of the site of cost-shifting from hospitals to the external insurance mechanism, where the underlying problems originated. There is a certain justice to that, but its main attraction is to make it visible and consensual, and therefore more generally accepted. It is one thing to convince a classroom of business students, quite another to convince the whole public, of the regrettable need for cost-shifting that will never seem completely fair.

And finally, there is the investment income. The public is no more likely to forgive its mercenary features than it is to accept that bankers are interested in more than profits from the interest on a loan. After all, interest-bearing loans were forbidden by law for centuries. When it first hears of the fairly astonishing 10% return from a passive investment, and the even more astonishing sums to be derived from ninety years of investing, the public will likely scoff at some sort of trickery. A great many people still prefer managed accounts to passive ones, in spite of Professor Ibbottson's rather convincing data from the immediately preceding century.

Two sources of concern are nevertheless impossible to answer. America may lose its dynamism, as even the Roman Empire eventually did, and nothing can withstand the financial consequences. And secondly, so many people might switch to passive investment that it loses its edge, and eventually pays less than hiding all savings in a mattress. That is to say, high returns imply high risk; without risk, there will be no returns. These considerations are long term and have nothing to do with healthcare. For this reason, I have reluctantly made the suggestion that we establish an independent organization, for all its flaws, to study whatever is happening and continuously make mid-course corrections to adjust for it.

Originally published: Tuesday, July 16, 2013; most-recently modified: Thursday, May 09, 2019