Health Care: The Cost of Doing Nothing

Reed Abelson reports on expert opinion on failing to reform the health care system in The New York Times.

Suppose Congress and President Obama fail to overhaul the system now, or just tinker around the edges, or start over, as the Republicans propose — despite the Democrats’ latest and possibly last big push that began last week at a marathon televised forum in Washington. Then “my health care” stays the same, right?

Far from it, health policy analysts and economists of nearly every ideological persuasion agree. The unrelenting rise in medical costs is likely to wreak havoc within the system and beyond it, and pretty much everyone will be affected, directly or indirectly. “People think if we do nothing, we will have what we have now,” said Karen Davis, the president of the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health care research group in New York. “In fact, what we will have is a substantial deterioration in what we have.”

Exploding costs are among the primary reasons most experts in the health care field advocate passing currently proposed legislation despite its problems. While proponents acknowledge that proposed legislation does not do enough to contain costs while extending coverage, it makes a vital start on this complex problem. As surgeon and best-selling health writer Atul Gawande notes in his New Yorker blog, fixing our health care system is not a one-off operation.

But this is just a start. Our current health-care system—bloated, Byzantine, and slowly bursting—presents seemingly insurmountable difficulties. It is too big, too complex, too entrenched. What may be most challenging about reforming it is that it cannot be fixed in one fell swoop of radical surgery. The repair is going to be a process, not a one-time event. The proposals Obama offers, and that Congress is slowly chewing over, would provide a dramatic increase in security for the average American. But they will only begin the journey toward transforming our system to provide safer, better, less wasteful care. We do not yet know with conviction all the steps that will rein in costs while keeping care safe. So, even if these initial reforms pass, we have to be prepared to come back every year or two to take another few hard and fiercely battled steps forward.

Abelson concludes his review with the warning that the longer we delay reform of health care, the more costs will rise. The costs of doing nothing are unacceptable.

--Ballard Burgher