“Imagine Americans receiving deposits into HSAs to pay for cash transactions and premiums for patient-driven insurance plans, backed by taxpayer-funded reinsurance as a safety net…” – Ge Bai
By Ge Bai
My op-ed in USA TODAY with Paula Muto, MD: End the ACA Subsidies and Give Patients Their Power Back
The third-party payment system has stripped power from patients, distorted incentives and disrupted markets. It doesn’t trust patients to choose, doctors to care or entrepreneurs to innovate. Prices remain hidden from patients because someone else is paying.
Patients, unable to benefit from lower prices or better health, exert little downward pressure on price or upward pressure on quality ‒ unlike consumers in other markets. The result: high prices, low quality and stagnant innovation prevail, all at the expense of patients.
As insurers and government programs seize control of health care dollars, medicine has become a compliance industry rather than a healing profession. Heavy compliance burdens fuel consolidation. Instead of private practice, more than three-quarters of physicians are now employed by hospitals/health systems and other corporate entities, with incentives tied to following corporate orders rather than improving patient outcomes.
Worse, policymakers often misdiagnose these predictable consequences of policy failures as a need for more central planning ‒ further distorting incentives, compounding money-grabbing opportunities, and leaving patients worse off clinically and financially.
Health care begins with the patient. In control of their dollars, patients make the best choices. When they pay directly, care happens faster. Providers must satisfy patients to earn their business ‒ aligning incentives, fostering competition and innovation, and creating a dynamic, vibrant marketplace for care.
Imagine Americans receiving deposits into HSAs to pay for cash transactions and premiums for patient-driven insurance plans, backed by taxpayer-funded reinsurance as a safety net…
Disadvantaged Americans should also receive subsidies through their HSAs, where funds are transferrable, inheritable and eligible for tax-deductible charitable contributions ‒ thereby incentivizing comparison shopping, promoting healthy living and transforming health care philanthropy.
Whoever pays holds the power. Funding patients directly would align incentives across the health care system, forcing all players to demonstrate and deliver value to individual patients in order to earn their business.
Competition, innovation, price and quality transparency, and patient education would naturally follow, fostering vibrant markets that best serve patients’ diverse needs.
Health care unaffordability is undermining both Americans’ well-being and America’s global leadership. The solution is simple: Patients must gain control of their earned or subsidized health care dollars. The power of free people and free markets can unleash American dynamism, uplift patients and ignite market transformations capable of defeating any entrenched special interest.
Fund the patient.
