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June 16, 2009 at 08:00 PM
Holding down the cost of health care and “universal” coverage programs could be more difficult than reform advocates might like to think.
Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, gives that assessment in an analysis prepared for Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
Health reform advocates say expanding the number of U.S. residents with health coverage could pay for itself, by eliminating the incentive for health care providers to shift the cost of treating the uninsured onto the shoulders of patients with health coverage, reducing inefficiency in health care, and improving the overall state of Americans’ health.
In the real world, Elmendorf writes, the effect of a reduction in cost shifting “would probably be relatively small and would not directly produce net savings in national or federal spending on health care.”
Expenditures on some types of uncompensated care arrangements might drop for a few years, but “undoing any current shifts of spending among different payers would not change the growth rate of federal spending beyond the first few years,” Elmendorf writes. “Moreover, uncompensated care is less significant than many people assume. According to one study, hospitals provided about $35 billion in uncompensated care nationwide in 2008–less than 2% of national health expenditures–and the estimates are much smaller for other providers.”
If health reform efforts expand Medicaid – a program that pays notoriously low fees for care — then providers may increase Medicaid-related cost shifting, Elmendorf writes.
Similarly, predictions that decreasing health care inefficiency – by, for example, making care in “inefficient” regions of the country as efficient as care in more efficient regions – can slash costs may be exaggerated, Elmendorf warns.
