In a recent study, PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 90% of all healthcare leaders don't believe a taxpayer funded healthcare system is the solution to America's healthcare crisis. This is despite the fact that the federal and state governments are funding nearly 50% of current healthcare costs in the United States today, and that healthcare costs are expected to rise to the point where they consume 21% of US GDP by the year 2020.
Without going into my personal feelings about “socialized medicine“ vs. the current U.S. healthcare model, I find it telling that in the PricewaterhouseCoopers study:
When asked what are important or very important to the future sustainability of the nation's healthcare system, more than eight in 10 (82 percent) said equal access to care; two-thirds (66 percent) said market-driven competition, and nearly 4 in 10 (39 percent) that said medical technology would need to be rationed (emphasis mine).
Yet the same study concluded that:
Technology will play an important role in strengthening the U.S. health system. Approximately three-quarters of respondents viewed information technology as important or very important for integrating care (74 percent).
This makes absolutely no sense to me. If the cure to America's healthcare ills lies - at least partially - with the free market, why impose artificial limitations on the availability of medical technology? Especially when it is seen as one of the pillars of the U.S. healthcare system?
In their 1996 paper entitled Information Technology and Productivity: A Review of the Literature, Erik Brynjolfsson and Shinkyu Yang found that “the price of computing has dropped by half every 2-3 years.” This was a reference to the hardware and software costs of computing before the advent of open source software and commodity hardware. To be fair, Brynjolfsson and Yang did not address the issue of to what extent medical technology affected the productivity of healthcare workers because data pertaining to the medical industry was not - and is not - easy to quantify.
However, the impact of medical technology on the productivity of healthcare workers is not the issue here; the desire of the industry's leaders to ration - and thereby charge a premium for - the technology itself is. Moreover, studies conducted to measure the impact of technology on productivity within the healthcare and insurance industries since 1996 show a strong correlation between the proliferation of technology and increases in the quantity and quality of healthcare services within the United States. Unless there has been a fundamental change in the nature of the laws of supply and demand, rationing medical technology should drive healthcare costs up, not down, and therefore threaten the sustainability of the U.S. healthcare system rather than help it.
I stand by my previous assessment of the industries' motives in light of these studies. The healthcare industry loves to feed at the public trough; what it fears are the economies of scale that would be created if the federal government were to get serious when throwing its collective weight around. Medicare Part D is a huge give-away to the health insurance industry, for example, and the last thing health insurers want is to see the government imposing standards that would shrink the size of the taxpayer pie. Unfortunatley, the healthcare industry also apparently fears the power of a truly free maket. Between these two extremes are gross inefficiences, huge profits, and you, me, and everyone else in this country who needs access to competent, affordable care.