By Dave Ranney
KHI News Service
TOPEKA, Jan. 18
The president of the Kansas Medical Society said it”s time to dump the notion that managed care controls health-care costs.
“In the past six years, medical inflation has gone up 40 percent while the Consumer Price Index has gone up 18 percent,” said Dr. Richard Warner, a psychiatrist from Kansas City, Kan.
“If this was a patient we were talking about,” he said, referring to the disparity, “we”d say the treatment hasn”t been very successful.”
Warner addressed a lunch hour forum at the Statehouse sponsored by the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank.
Managed care doesn”t work, he said, because once a premium is paid, access to health care is seen as an entitlement and no attention is paid to the true cost of care.
Warner said that”s why so many businesses
small and large
are struggling to provide health care benefits.
“A small business with, say, 15 employees cannot afford health insurance,” he said, “and yet General Motors is saying the same thing.”
A government-run program, he said, would be no better.
“If the smallest and the biggest employers are saying they can”t afford it, what makes us think that an even bigger employer the government
could afford it?” he said.
A better way to control costs, Warner said, would be to create a marketplace where employees would have multiple choices of policies and, presumably, base their decisions on the costs of each.
Government could
and should
promote such a marketplace, he said.
Warner said he”s encouraged by some of the market reforms underway in Massachusetts and recently proposed in California.
He scoffed at calls for price transparency, calling the price tags “meaningless numbers.”
He said he doubted that plans for spending billions of dollars on medical record-keeping technology will do much to control costs.
About 30 people
a mix of legislators, lobbyists and passersby
attended the 45-minute forum.
Some of Warner”s remarks struck a chord with Corrie Edwards, executive director of the non-profit Kansas Health Consumer Coalition.
“I agree with going to more of a customer-driven system,” she said, “but I would hate to see us go to a system that may be more affordable but, at the same time, wouldn”t cover anything.”
Dave Ranney is a staff writer for KHI News Service, which specializes in coverage of health issues facing Kansans. He can be reached at
dranney@khi.org
or at 785-233-5443, ext. 128.