Calpundit says what’s been on my mind and probably the mind of lots of others:
Still, it’s a fact that healthcare costs do continue to spiral in the United States, and it makes life miserable for businesses that have to deal with it. These guys don’t want to be in the healthcare business, don’t want to have to compete with other businesses (here or overseas) that have lower healthcare costs than them, and don’t want to be in a constant war with their employees over day-to-day healthcare issues.
Which is why I continue to be surprised that the business community hasn’t come out in favor of national health insurance yet. Sure, I know business leaders tend to be conservative, but you’d think a pocketbook issue like this would bring them to their senses. Individual businesses have virtually no leverage to reduce healthcare costs, and the only way to remove this albatross from around their necks is to hand it off to the feds.
In the end, I suspect that this is what will finally lead the United States to a single-payer healthcare model. At some point, business leaders will finally have had enough and will insist that the Republican party change its tune and support national healthcare. By all odds, this day is probably no more than a decade off.
If I might risk oversimplifying or repeating myself, the in-between compromise solutions for health care are unsatisfactory for a confluence of basic reasons. For one thing, the provision of health care is historically addressed in the US through insurance, whereas our basic demands of health care provision run counter to the logic of insurance, which seeks to compensate those for unforeseen expense and to mitigate risk.
Second, having employers subsidize coverage makes labor market efficiency difficult: for instance, how many employees really feel like they’re getting a substantial raise over the last three years? Their companies are paying more, but the level of health care is more or less seemingly the same.
Finally, the peculiarly American form of tort law means added costs. The liberal commentariat has made hay recently of the conservative claims of a malpractice “lawsuit crisis” (see the American Prospect, for instance); I’m eager to hear and learn more about where the empirical data lies. But it’s one thing to argue that the tort problem is overblown, another thing to argue that tort law allows the most efficient and just allocation of health care resources, which after all, should be the priority.
This issue really has the potential to be the new Keynesian compact in which business and labor both feel like they’re getting something out of the bargain. Or, maybe, it’s the old Keynesian compact, which the US has yet to fully enact. Let’s hope it will.
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