NEJM editors: runaway hlth care costs due to administrative overhead & excessive use of expensive technology

We don't need a BCBSNC that has millions of dollars 'in escrow' (read: padding the pockets of investors and CEO's and managers) if we're going to have an efficient health care system.

Take your pick: one or the other.

From the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/opinion/l16health.html


David Leonhardt, in his May 13 column (“Health Care, a Lesson in Pain,” Economic Scene), is quite right that “the only way to have a sustainable universal health care system is to control costs.” But in analyzing the experts’ testimony before the Senate Finance Committee on how to pay for health care, he did not mention a solution that neither the experts nor the committee wants to consider: major reform of the system.

Runaway costs are due largely to high overhead expenses throughout the system, and to the excessive use of expensive technology. Both of these result from a health care system that is organized like a profit-seeking industry instead of a social service.

If we want health care to be a universal entitlement, it cannot be controlled by market forces and the financial interests of insurers and providers (and the investors who own such a large part of the system).

Some kind of government-regulated single-payer insurance plan and a reorganized nonprofit medical care delivery system may be “off the table” for policy makers right now, but we will never achieve affordable universal coverage without major reform that deals with the real causes of medical inflation.

We don’t need more money; we need a new system.

Arnold S. RelmanMarcia Angell Cambridge, Mass., May 14, 2009

The writers, medical doctors, are former editors in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine.