Most healthcare proposals — including Medicare for All, Medicare at 50, a public insurance option, expanding Obamacare, and allowing the federal government to negotiate prescription drug prices — share one thing in common: a more aggressive government role in healthcare. What are free market proponents and conservatives to do in response?
A new executive order from the Trump administration may finally provide a solution.
The executive order covers price transparency, access to data, surprise billing, and more. It represents a forward-thinking, free market approach to solving the nation’s health spending woes. This is important because free market advocates have struggled to cut through the noise on healthcare with ideas that promote cost transparency, competition, and continued private sector innovation.
A May Kaiser Family Foundation poll makes it clear that the time to act is now, reporting that 59% of adults with employer-sponsored health insurance list cost-related factors as “most important,” while only 26% list coverage-related factors. This has flipped from 15 years ago, when 33% of adults listed cost-related factors as “most important” and 60% listed coverage-related factors.
There’s a lot in Trump’s new executive order these voters would like.
It instructs various Cabinet officials to both align and improve their quality measures across a panoply of federal health programs, which will reduce inconsistencies and inefficiencies in federal health data and spending. The order makes anonymous claims data available to the private sector and academia, which could lead to further, entrepreneur-driven solutions to runaway health spending. And it promises to expand health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts, giving Americans another more affordable option to obtain healthcare.
That last part is particularly important. The most well-known healthcare proposal in Washington, D.C., right now, “Medicare for all,” would give every American just one health insurance option. By expanding health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts, which enable individuals in certain health plans to pay for their care with tax-free savings, the administration is offering consumers more choices, not taking options away.
Conservatives who support a robust, competitive, and free market for health insurance should celebrate these initiatives as well as the expansion of health reimbursement arrangements that enable employers to make tax-free contributions to the medical expenses of their employees.
Other aspects of the executive order merit further discussion in the coming months. For example, six months from now the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services will need to report to the president on how the department should address surprise billing. At least one of the president’s surprise billing principles represents a strong start: “Federal healthcare expenditures should not increase.”
It’s critical that proposals from the executive or legislative branches resist the urge to fix today’s problems with the next generation’s taxpayer dollars. With the national debt at $22 trillion and counting, we simply can’t afford runaway health spending, which any big-government solution to healthcare would almost certainly entail.
Stakeholders will also eagerly be watching for how the department addresses hospital pricing disclosure. Some have raised concerns that the administration’s proposal could backfire and that there is such a thing as “too much transparency.” Health spending solutions should be focused on promoting robust competition in the free market that empowers consumers, rather than inefficient, costly, and potentially counterproductive government mandates.
American taxpayers care about the cost of healthcare more than ever, and they need policy solutions that make healthcare more affordable while maintaining a robust, competitive free market. Republicans must offer such solutions, or socialism will surely win.
Andrew Lautz is a policy and government affairs associate with the National Taxpayers Union, a nonprofit dedicated to lower and fairer taxes at all levels of government.
