Comment Rescue: Read Carney’s Transition Team Report
Stewball wrote: “The media hasn’t covered this much yet, but if you look at Carney’s transition report released last week, he seems to embrace the draconian health savings accounts for state employees that the former Governor proposed each of the last two years.”
I’ve been meaning to get to Carney’s Transition Team Report: Action Plan for Delaware (pdf). Maybe now’s the time we should all read it. Thanks Stewball for the reminder.
HSA’s are another example of the economic rents that keep the industrial medical system thriving.
https://twitter.com/oncotastic/status/823997517268291584
Uwe Reinhardt calls them a cruel hoax within a trend that is built on rationing care delivery by class/income. It’s a trend that has been on the rise and was not remediate, but accelerated during the recent “healthcare cost slowdown” driven mostly by macroeconomic trends.
From a recent talk given by professor Reinhardt:
“At this time, the gradual transformation of our health-care system into one that allows us to ration health care by income is not yet complete.
Part of the problem is that it is not yet politically correct for politicians or the policy wonks who advise them openly to state that rationing by income class is their goal.
The desired structure therefore has to be developed quietly, and so that the general voting public does not know what is happening to their health system.
Indeed, sometimes the steps toward this goal are marketed to the voting public in classic Orwellian lingo – e.g., “Consumer Directed Health Care” (CDHC) that will “enable consumers [formerly patients] to sit in the driver’s seat in health care to shop around for cost-effective care.”
Absent solid, consumer-friendly information on binding prices and the quality of health care produced by different providers of health care – still typically the norm in the U.S. – CDHC actually has turned out to be a cruel hoax.
For the most part, CDHC has been merely an instrument to ration health care by income.
We came across the following paper that goes along with our thesis on rationing: “Wealthy spending more on health care than poor and middle class, reversing trend”
Study quoted found here: http://m.content.healthaffairs.org/content/35/7/1189.abstract
Slides from the talk can by found here:
http://altarum.org/sites/default/files/uploaded-related-files/12_Reinhardt_Special_ALTARUM%20JULY%202016%20XX%207-18-2016_1.pdf
@nemski – you’re welcome. Glad I reminded you. There’s a fair amount of info in the transition report. I’m going to glance thru it again tonight. The health savings account language jumped out at me the first time, but I want to revisit the rest of the budget section.