Res Ipsa Loquitur

Having nothing but time on his hands like any law student, esteemed reader Patrick sent me a link to a pdf containing the arbitration brief of a recent and widely publicized case. Far be it from me to beat a dead horse, but it seems a tidy argument for finding a way to provide health care without the need for dozens and scores of insurance companies. (And as an aside, a look at why, to some degree anyway, I've always been sort-of attracted to law as a profession: the orderliness, the linearity, the need for factual and logical thinking. Sometimes.)

The case is that of a woman who, despite having perfectly good health insurance, was approached by a (predatory?) guy wanting to sell her a less-expensive policy. Forms were filled out. She evidently thought it was going to be some sort of automatic transfer, rather than an application. At some point, the number for her weight had been changed on the form; the change was initialed by the agent, not by the woman. The form went forward, the insurance company reviewers noted the change but did not raise questions at the time, at least not to the woman. The old insurance dropped, the new policy established. Then she got breast cancer. Ostensibly because of the weight-change shenanigans, the insurance was canceled. Claims and counter-claims were made, and the case went to arbitration by a retired judge. (My dad was a judge, and when he retired, he was a much sought-after arbitrator.) (There's no real point to that interjection other than the fact that I always enjoyed hearing him discuss the process and the issues.) The result was a decision in favor of the woman, to the tune of several million dollars.

One might see the case as less about bad old insurers than about fine points of insurance law. In the brief, there was much about "due consideration" and "good faith" and various quite particular minutiae, from which one might or might not generalize. But one fact struck me as very important beyond the case at hand: employees of the insurer are paid, in part, based on how many claims they DENY; how much money they save for the company. They get bonuses for that. (Outrage mine.)

Just good business, some would say; and at some level they'd have a point. But that's exactly the problem. Having insurers sitting between providers and patients, taking money from both -- inserting the business of business and creating a whole profit-making/money-sucking ("non-profit" or not) enterprise that has nothing to do with providing actual care -- seems an obvious and unnecessary waste of health care dollars. Particularly when the business thus inserted clearly -- because its business is business, not healthcare -- has the aim of authorizing the least amount of care that is possible.

Most doctors hate the idea of a single-payer health care system, and for many good reasons, most of which have to do with concerns about loss of control. Of care decisions, of pay. I share them. But there can be no doubt that the system as now constructed in the US diverts huge amounts of dollars to companies that have nothing to do with actual care, and even -- as we see here -- to funding their efforts not to pay for it; and the amount is way more than would occur with a single payer and a single set of rules, aimed at paying for care rather than trying not to.

I've made it clear how disastrous I think is the trend, especially in Medicare and Medicaid, to pay providers less and less; how it will lead to huge access problems and changes in the sort of people who choose to become doctors. About that I have no illusions. But I don't think "single payer" and "cutting pay" and "onerous rules" need to be synonymous. For one, there'd be more money to work with. And it simply can't be totally impossible to find an operating model that would include providers in a meaningful way to set up and govern the execution. Improbable, maybe, but not impossible; unless politics as usual remains politics as usual.