Physician Pay
Arnold Kling
Alex Berenson thinks that he has gotten to the crux of America's health care spending problem.
the partisan fight over insurers and drug makers is a distraction from a bigger problem: the relatively high salaries paid to American doctors, and even more importantly, the way they are compensated.
Berenson notes that American doctors earn more than doctors in other countries. However, average incomes in general (for non-doctors) are higher in the U.S. Also, doctors tend to work more hours in the U.S., and we tend to have more specialists. Adjusting for these factors, the "excess pay" of U.S. doctors is probably not enough to account for more than a small portion of our higher medical spending.
Berenson points out that fee-for-service medicine creates an incentive for doctors to offer more procedures. However, there is no perfect compensation scheme. Other approaches, such as fixed-salary systems or compensation tied to outcomes, reduce the incentive for doctors to deal with sick patients.
The biggest incentive problem in health care is the insulation from costs under comprehensive health insurance. Without changing that, it is almost impossible to reduce spending on physicians. My expectation is that under a government-run health system in the U.S., doctors would be even more powerful than they are today.
econlog.econlib.org
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My take. I sortof agree, but
1 - Yes if you adjust for average income's in general in the US, the fact that American doctors on average work more hours than in many other developed countries, and the fact that we tend to have more specialists, than our doctors may not be a lot more expensive, but those factors themselves (except maybe the working more hours factor) are themselves reasons for higher costs.
2 - I think there is a decent chance that doctors would be more powerful under a government run health system (or a government run health insurance system, which is the more common proposal), but I think I'm less confident about this than Kling. I would be more likely to say something like "We don't have good reason to be confident that they will have less power over their compensation." A counter to even my weaker point might be that medicaid has limits on what it pays doctors , that are typically lower than what most people or insurance companies pay, but such limits push many doctors to not accept patients in the program. If such limits reduced the availability and/or quality of health care of a majority of the population, they would be likely to be attacked and perhaps struck down. |
