Only 11 percent of health care spending in America is directly financed by consumers. The rest is paid for by taxpayers, insurance companies, and other third parties.
This has eviscerated the normal working of a competitive market. When people are spending their own money, they are careful and prudent. When they spend other people’s money, however, they are not overly concerned about cost.
As a result, we have a needlessly expensive system. And because third-party payer requires lots of administration and paper work, bad government policies also have caused absurd levels of inefficiency.
Well, there’s one small piece of Obamacare that actually is helping to mitigate this problem. The law includes a so-called Cadillac tax that caps the special tax preference for fringe benefits (if your employer provides you a health insurance policy as part of your compensation, that type of income isn’t taxed, unlike your cash wages).
And that reform is having a positive impact. Here are some passages from aBloomberg story.
Large employers are increasingly putting an end to their most generous health-care coverage as a tax on “Cadillac” insurance plans looms closer under Obamacare. Employees including bankers at JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and college professors at Harvard University are seeing a range of moves to shift more costs to workers.…The tax takes effect in 2018, and employers are already laying the groundwork to make sure they don’t have to pay the 40 percent surcharge on health-insurance spending that exceeds $27,500 for a family or $10,200 for an individual. Once envisioned as a tool to slow the nation’s growing health-care tab, the tax has in practice meant higher out-of-pocket health-care costs for workers.
The last sentence in the excerpt, by the way, is economically illiterate.
The Cadillac tax will restrain health spending because it means higher out-of-pocket costs for consumers. They are going to have more authority and responsibility of how to spend their own money.
Think of this analogy. Will you eat more if I give you $25 to buy a meal or if I give you a pre-paid voucher for a $25 all-you-can-eat buffet?
If you’re a normal person, you’ll take the $25 cash, buy a meal for less than that amount, and save the extra money for something else.
But if you’re given a pre-paid voucher for the buffet, you’ll pig out because there’s no additional cost for consuming more items.
And the Bloomberg story includes evidence that giving consumers more control over their income is having the predicted positive effect.
Forum for Healthcare Freedom 
Reblogged this on IP4PI – Independent Physicians for Patient independence.
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