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As the healthcare affordability crisis escalates, efforts to fix the U.S. health system seem to have hit a wall. Some policy experts are calling for government price controls, while other experts and healthcare leaders still support value-based care (VBC), despite its limited impact on national health spending.
Can these two schools of thought be reconciled as complementary strategies to curb the relentless growth in U.S. health costs?
‘No Other Choice’
The basic theme of the calls for price controls is that we have no other choice.
“If the prices are too high and competition has not been able to do anything about it, we really have no choice but to go to [price] regulation,” said Paul Ginsburg, former chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission and a professor at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Institute and Price School of Public Policy in Los Angeles, in MedPage Today.
At the same time, health economists Len Nichols and Paul Hughes-Cromwick propose to establish a system of national all-payer rate setting. In an opinion piece for MedPage Today, they outline a plan that is along the lines of what Maryland did decades ago on hospital prices. While they admit that it would be very difficult to get such a measure through Congress, the economists view it as a necessary first step toward effective healthcare reform. Drastic changes are needed, they emphasize, to ensure that most people will continue to have access to the healthcare system.