For Care Giver… coming soon
A tweak here, an adjustment there: For all the sturm und drang surrounding the release of the Senate’s health-care bill, the Better Health Care Act is not the answer to a better quality of care for a larger number of Americans at a lower cost.
The same can be said about its House counterpart, the American Health Care Act. Or, for that matter, the Affordable Care Act, all of which reshuffle and reallocate the same resources. Both parties are living in la-la land when it comes to health-care reform, promising the moon with no workable ideas for a delivery system to get there.
Let’s begin with the basic premise: More, better, cheaper health care is a fiction, as evidenced by the ACA and implied by the AHCA and BHCA. The law of supply and demand, a bedrock of economics, dictates that increased demand for health care at any given price — expressed as an outward shift in the demand curve — yields higher prices.
That’s problem one. An estimated 30 million Americans gained access to care with the enactment of the ACA. At the same time, the law’s provisions to revamp health-care delivery systems, however well-intentioned, have had more limited results (supply-side effects) in terms of improving the quantity, quality and cost of care.