Grace-Marie Turner, president and founder of the Galen Institute, is one of the nation’s leading voices on health care reform. Turner has been the force behind the Health Policy Consensus Group, a forum where some of the best minds in health care policy discuss possible solutions. Many of these ideas came together in Health Care Choices 2020, a policy blueprint of ten specific measures that can fix health care’s biggest problems. Turner talked with Health Care News managing editor AnneMarie Schieber on how politicians can get beyond easy-sell government-centered proposals and focus on fixing the root problems.
Health Care News: Everyone knows health care needs fixing. In this election cycle, inflation and illegal immigration are the dominant issues. Why is health care always overshadowed by other concerns?
Turner: Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier for politicians to make empty promises and paper over their mistakes, or object to the policies on the other side, than to sit down and do the hard work of negotiating bipartisan legislation. That is what we at the Consensus Group continue to work toward.
The problems of health care will never go away until we address the underlying problems, like the distortions created by government programs and mandates, that attempt to make health care coverage more affordable.
We know that addressing underlying problems works in other sectors of the American economy, but we haven’t given it enough of a chance in health care. Instead of tackling this challenge, politicians sadly devolve toward a war of words on health care and pivot to other topics like inflation and illegal immigration.
Health Care News: People are terrified by health care costs. Do you think this makes it tougher to sell voters on the concept of free-market health care?
Turner: The United States spends $4.5 trillion every year on health care. That means nearly one out of every five dollars in the U.S. economy goes to health care. And everyone is passing the buck on who needs to fix the cost problem.
One of the reasons our health sector costs so much is because it is distorted by third-party payment systems: the patient receives services; a hospital or clinician provides the services; and either the government or insurance pays most of the bill. No one is making sure the best services are being provided at the lowest costs.
The Left continues to try to tinker with the system rather than addressing the underlying problems created by third-party interference.
A truly competitive, patient-centered system would respond to patients’ demands for better coverage, access to the best doctors and hospitals, and more affordable prices. Government mandates will never get us there. We cannot price-control our way out of this mess. The patient-consumer winds up paying the total bill, through higher taxes, lost wages, deficit spending that leads to inflation, or premiums and other direct out-of-pocket costs.
The consumer is the only one who ultimately can drive change, by forcing the market to respond to their spending power. We need to trust that the market can work, just as it did with Medicare Part D, to bring costs down and give people affordable coverage and care that meets their needs.
The job of the next Congress is to undo the Biden-Harris administration’s destructive changes to Part D.
Health Care News: So much is on voters’ minds, but we don’t hear much about health policy except chants like “Medicare for All.” Do Republicans focus too much on the process and not the benefits of reform?
Turner: Republicans have been developing and presenting health reform proposals for decades, but our plans get little attention from the mainstream media.
We would restore genuine consumer-centered competition in the health sector. We have had numerous successes passed into law, including health savings accounts, the private-option Medicare Advantage plans, and the competitive Medicare prescription drug (Part D) benefit enacted in 2003.
The Part D plan, for example, has been remarkably successful in providing a wide choice of 150 categories of medications to seniors through a popular program that has saved them and taxpayers money. More than half of seniors on Medicare have voluntarily enrolled in private, competing Medicare Advantage plans to get better coverage at lower costs.
The mainstream media basically ignores our successes and policy statements and continues to say conservatives have no ideas for health reform. They are very wrong! Our Health Care Choices plan, for example, had 80-plus signatories from the Health Policy Consensus Group and offered dozens of recommendations to provide better, more affordable, portable health coverage for people on Obamacare plans and Medicaid. But it gets little attention.
Health Care News: How does the left manage to get its policies enacted more successfully?
Turner: The left continues to create new government programs that sound politically appealing but inject new distortions into the health sector. The Left then tries to hide the problems they’ve created by spending even more taxpayer dollars.
The latest example is the major Part D premium increases resulting from Biden-Harris coverage directives. Medicare for All would be the granddaddy of government-controlled health care in which all Americans would lose their current coverage and cost taxpayers tens of trillions of dollars to fund the new system.
We know that our health sector is too vast and regional and complex to be fixed with any one bill. Instead, it requires precise, targeted changes to put doctors and patients rather than Washington bureaucrats in charge of choices. That is what all of our Consensus Group’s policy recommendations are designed to do.