The High Cost of Healthcare: Is it Really Just the Prices?

Uwe Reinhardt, the eminent health care economist, who died last week, spent his career diagnosing the ills of the U.S. medical system and suggesting remedies. One of his most famous articles, written with colleagues Gerard F. Anderson, Peter S. Hussey, and Varduhi Petrosyan, bore the trenchant title, “It’s the Prices, Stupid.” In it, Renhardt and his co-authors concluded,

In 2000 the United States spent considerably more on health care than any other country, whether measured per capita or as a percentage of GDP. At the same time, most measures of aggregate utilization such as physician visits per capita and hospital days per capita were below the OECD median. Since spending is a product of both the goods and services used and their prices, this implies that much higher prices are paid in the United States than in other countries. But U.S. policymakers need to reflect on what Americans are getting for their greater health spending. They could conclude: It’s the prices, stupid.

Yes, our health care is plagued by high prices, with the cost of some new cancer treatments approaching a million dollars. However, as an article by Katie Hafner and Griffin Palmer in Tuesday’s New York Times details, it is not always just the prices.

Hafner and Palmer explore the rapid increase in the treatment of older Americans for skin cancer. To some extent, the increase can be explained by demographics—the aging of a generation that grew up with no clue that exposure to the sun’s rays could be anything but beneficial. However, demographics alone cannot explain why the number of biopsies for skin cancer that were billed to traditional Medicare Part B has risen 55 percent over the past decade, despite a small drop in that program’s enrollment.

The article zeros in on the role of private dermatology clinics, the largest of which is Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery. The growth of ADCS has been fueled, in part, by an investment of $600 million by Harvest Partners, a private equity firm. ADCS makes heavy use of physician assistants to perform thousands of biopsies and treatments. The authors question the adequacy of supervision of the assistants by qualified MDs (as required by law). They report the opinion of independent specialists who characterize ADCS treatments as far too aggressive, especially for cancers that are unlikely to be fatal, and for patients who are near the end of their lives from other causes.

This examination of a single specialty raises the obvious question: Is it still just the prices, stupid, or are other factors also at work?

Although the New York Times story on dermatology is largely anecdotal, it fits in with another line of evidence that suggests that high U.S. healthcare expenditures are driven by demand, not just by higher prices per quantity supplied. Some of that evidence in question is laid out in a long, data-packed post by the anonymous author of the blog Random Critical Analysis (RCA). (If you don’t want to spend an hour working through RCA’s original post, Tyler Cohen has a brisk summary here.)

RCA maintains that although U.S. healthcare spending seems way out of line with that of its OECD peers when stated relative to GDP, it is not nearly so far out of line when compared to consumption. After all, as RCA points out, health care is a “superior good” with high income elasticity. In plain Englsih, that means Americans, like people all over the world, tend to devote a higher percentage of their total consumption spending to health care as their standard of living rises.

Although there are a few countries that have higher per capita GDP than the United States, there are none that have higher per capita consumption. Part of the reason is that Americans don’t save much. Another reason is that the United States runs a trade deficit, which makes its consumption larger as a share of GDP compared to countries that export a lot, like Germany or Norway. RCA also adjusts consumption data to reflect cross-national differences in the share of goods and services that are paid for by government but consumed by individuals.

As John Cochrane points out in a comment on his own blog, the scandal is not that we spend so much on healthcare, but that we don’t get more for our money. Our high propensity to consume health care should not curb, but rather, should spur our search for reforms that could increase the efficiency of our healthcare system.

Based on notes previously posted at NiskanenCenter.com.