In my last Health Affairs Blog post, I outlined a potentially bipartisan four-step plan to move past the American Health Care Act’s (AHCA’s) disastrous framework toward a more stable, less expensive health care system. For those seeking incremental, near-term solutions, I hope those recommendations provide helpful guidance.
But the AHCA’s reckless drive through the US House of Representatives has taught us something about the current status of health care politics and may have opened the window to more significant, ultimately more successful, reforms. To put it mildly, the public is essentially fed up with debating how to realign the fragmented elements of our Rube Goldbergian system. Its machinations are too complex, its politics too fickle, and its rent is too damn high for the care we are getting.
Where do we turn, then? More complexity? Cutting millions from coverage and shifting more costs to working families? With those options likely to be rejected, as conservative heavyweight Charles Krauthammer recently asserted, we may be heading “inexorably” toward a single-payer system. Poll after poll has in fact shown that a majority of Americans support such an approach. Most recently, an Economist/YouGov survey found that 60 percent of Americans support expanding Medicare to cover everyone, with only 23 percent opposed. If the AHCA defies odds and is enacted, this will only become exponentially truer as its impacts are felt.
But, you are quick to add, there are a variety of deep-seated concerns with a single-payer approach that have kept it out of mainstream political discourse so far. That’s undoubtedly true. They include: It will necessitate massive tax increases; it will cut reimbursement for services to unsustainably low rates; it will be lower quality than the employer-sponsored coverage most Americans currently have; it will consolidate power into the hands of a small number of bureaucrats; etc., etc.
My goal with this post is to demonstrate that a “unified” (punchline: It wouldn’t truly be single payer…), market-driven, federally regulated, privately delivered system need not possess any of these objectionable attributes. In fact, the parameters of such a system are all but staring us right in the face. I call it: Medicare Advantage Premium Support for All (MAPSA).
While any flavor of single payer may be the last thing that comes to mind when contemplating bipartisan initiatives, just as the far left and far right share some libertarian (and other) commonalities, we may have indeed finally come full circle in this tiresome, so-far-futile debate. By combining two shots of conservative orthodoxy with one overflowing progressive one, and stirring slowly, it is not at all far-fetched to envision an endgame cocktail for our health care system that covers everyone, decreases costs, and can pass Congress. Cheers.
HENRY KOTULA 