The Economist: Business in America

The latest issue of The Economist has a special report on Business in America. You can view it here. Some passages which stuck out to me:

Second, one can look at America’s admirable record of dealing with turmoil. A study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a think-tank that studies entrepreneurialism, found that America’s high rate of economic “churning” boosts productivity and hence material well-being. Between 1977 and 2005 some 15% of all American jobs were destroyed each year as firms closed or cut back. Thanks to the expansion of successful firms and the entry of new ones, however, many more jobs were created than destroyed. Start-ups (ie, firms less than five years old) provided a third of the new jobs during this period.

...

But the central problem is that most Americans get their health insurance through their employers. This dates back to the era of post-war wage controls, when firms offered benefits instead of pay rises. Today’s tax code sets it in stone. Employers can buy health insurance with pre-tax dollars. Individuals cannot.

This creates an agency problem. When a typical patient goes to the doctor, he has no idea what anything costs. He pays only about 15% of the bill, so if the doctor recommends something he will probably say yes. The doctor gets paid for everything he does, so he has a powerful incentive to perform costly, unnecessary procedures. Besides, he may be socked for damages if he omits a test that a lawyer subsequently convinces a jury might have been useful. The costs are passed on to insurers, who pass them on to employers in the form of higher premiums, who then pass them on to workers in the form of lower pay.

...

…Managed care will return. This is the model whereby doctors work for the insurer, which pays them to keep people well. Instead of letting patients go straight to a specialist, managed-care firms like Kaiser Permanente make them see a primary-care doctor first, who will figure out whether the problem is serious. This is crucial. Specialists tend to recommend their own specialism—surgeons advocate surgery, and so on. The lack of a gatekeeper in traditional fee-for-service insurance leads to over-doctoring that is often harmful as well as costly, as that IBM executive discovered.