The modern health care maze: development and effects of the four-party system.

• Author: Kroncke, Charles
• Position: Essay

Our national health care system is so dauntingly complex that reform efforts seem hopelessly adrift. How should we proceed in reforming that system? As a rule, any "realistic" reform project must begin with a survey of its principal stakeholders. A stakeholder, by definition, is any party who has a "stake" in the outcome--that is, anyone who stands to benefit or to suffer from either maintaining or changing the status quo. Our health care system today comprises many and often competing stakeholder groups. The four most visible ones are first-party patients, who seek access to an imponderable variety of health care products and services; second-party providers of these products and services, including hospitals, physicians, nurses, physical therapists, dentists, and pharmaceutical companies; third-party payers, including private insurance companies, government programs such as Medicaid and Medicare, and their employees; and fourth-party employers, who purchase health insurance for their employees and thereby obtain a deductible expense in calculating their federal income-tax liability.

Other stakeholder groups are less visible, but nonetheless salient. There are scientists engaged in research and development of medical products and services. Some are employed by research laboratories affiliated with private corporations, and others are employed by government labs. Most are funded by government research grants. Many scientists teach at tuition-driven public and private educational institutions that train future researchers, providers, and institutional administrators. There are also financial institutions that lend tuition money to ambitious college students in the health care professions and provide capital to hospitals, laboratories, and other facilities. And we must not forget the vast number of lawyers and law firms that specialize in medical malpractice litigation and the insurance companies that sell malpractice insurance. Many stakeholders directly or indirectly earn paychecks by building, maintaining, and managing the aforementioned institutions and programs, and many of these people are affiliated with labor unions or professional societies. Many of us invest in mutual funds that hold stock in the health care sector. The most ephemeral of all stakeholder groups are those that lack favorable tax status and therefore indirectly finance our health care system.

In the United States, politics--that is, each stakeholder group's capacity to influence powerful legislators--drives health care reform. Some groups stand to benefit from maintaining the status quo, whereas others stand to benefit from reform. Therefore, politically sensitive presidential candidates and lawmakers tend to "nibble around the edges" for fear of alienating a stakeholder group. Revolutionary change therefore is highly unlikely.

Health care is, indeed, much more complex than the traditional doctor-patient relationship suggests. The health care industry in the United States accounts for at least 14 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), with approximately $5,267 spent per person annually (Cannon and Tanner 2007). Between 2007 and 2017, growth in health care spending is expected to remain steady at about 6.7 percent per year, but by 2017 health care will account for about one-fifth of the U.S. economy (Keehan et al. 2008, w145), which greatly exceeds its proportion in other nations. Moreover, the government's role in financing health care is expanding. Prior to Medicare's creation in 1965, the public sector accounted for approximately 25 percent of health care expenditures; today its portion is 45 percent (Sharp, Register, and Grimes 2008, 446). The U.S. government funds the lion's share of the medical research done in this country, from which the entire world benefits. The National Institutes of Health alone spend about $28 billion annually.

Prevailing discourse on health care reform aims at the simultaneous realization of three extraordinarily idealistic goals: universal access to high-quality health care at a reasonable cost. However, all three of these goals mask hidden complexities. When we say "universal access," exactly what products and services do we want everyone to have access to? What do we mean by "high-quality health care," and how do we know it when we see it? Finally, what do we mean by "reasonable cost?"

It is also important to acknowledge that throughout the world, health care has always been shaped by cultural, economic, and political forces. In the United States, it has been influenced not only by our own unique historical gravitas, but also by earlier European precedents, especially in Germany, England, and France (Dutton 2007). Although most reformers tend to reduce European health care traditions to pejorative, simplistic terms, such as socialized medicine, these national systems differ greatly among themselves, and none of them approaches the ideal of providing universal access to high-quality health care at reasonable cost.

All governments influence access, quality, and cost of health care by means of enabling legislation, which invariably benefits some stakeholder groups at the expense of others. This kind of legislation takes many different forms, ranging from outright subsidies to licensure requirements and favorable tax status. The current state of the health care industry in the United States has been shaped by an accumulation of enabling legislation that began in the early twentieth century and continues unabated today.

In this article, we argue that much of the daunting complexity of health care reform can be reduced if we focus more critically on the four-party payment system. Sustained by a mountain of ill-advised enabling legislation, this system has become a public-policy juggernaut. Yet most contemporary reform packages seek to build on this maladapted tradition despite its obvious deficiencies.

Many critics of the U.S. health care system argue that our practice of "free-market" medicine has been a failure, and we ought to follow the Europeans and embrace "socialized medicine." We maintain, however, that this country's "awkward flirtation with the marketplace" (Whalen 2003) more closely resembles corporate welfare than an experiment in free-market medicine. Therefore, we suggest that before Americans abandon the free market, they ought at least to try it.

Third-Party Payment

Third-party payment systems traditionally involve the interaction of three self-interested stakeholder groups: a first party who is in need (or may be in need in the near future), a second party who is willing to sell or give products or services that might meet those needs, and a third party who is willing and able to pay the second party on behalf of the first party. Third parties act sometimes out of charitable motives, sometimes with the prospect of future reciprocity in mind, and sometimes simply for immediate profit. The history of third-party payment in the United States chronicles how our current insurance-based system evolved from arrangements based on charity and reciprocity to arrangements based on profit.

The rise of third-party payment in the distribution of health care is attributable to incremental sociopolitical construction around the original concept of "insurance." That concept is rooted in our psychological response to risk taking, whereby self-interested, rational agents seek to avoid potentially devastating harms, and other self-interested rational agents respond to this quest.

In the eighteenth century, third-party payment in the United States was based on charity. Individuals living in cooperative (often rural) communities eased the impact of catastrophic events by sharing risks through pooling their time, effort, and resources. If a neighbor's home was ravaged by fire, family and friends voluntarily helped rebuild it. These helpers may or may not have had an underlying expectation of reciprocity or profit. "Insurance," in this sense, was often couched in idealized religious or moral terms, such as "Christian charity" or a "sense of duty." Later, as communities became more urbanized and impersonal, voluntary helping associations, such as mutual aid societies and fraternal organizations (for example, the Loyal Order of Moose), gradually took root in many urban areas (Beito 2000, Chalupnicek and Dvorak 2009).

The modern era has been marked by the collateral rise of corporate (private) and governmental (public) third-party payers, which has gradually transformed informal, personal, and community-based reciprocity into a vast industry and a complex system of social welfare. In recent years, the role of third parties in health care has become larger. Today, only 12.6 percent of health care payments are paid out of the pockets of the patients receiving the care (Sharp, Register, and Grimes 2008, 446).

All third-party payment systems are constrained by the availability of economic resources. Hence, cooperative communities, informal voluntary associations, and (eventually) private and public third-party payers ration their assistance based on four broad harm-related parameters: specificity (conceptual clarity regarding the harm to be remedied), frequency (how often this harm may occur), magnitude (the degree of pain or suffering associated with the harm), and predictability (insurers' capacity to predict the harm's magnitude and frequency). Third-party payers, therefore, limit their assistance to providing security against relatively well-defined, infrequent, and costly harms that are "beyond the control of the insured" (Starr 1982, 290).

The first private insurance policies issued in the United States, which covered property in case of fires and floods, gradually displaced localized, informal, cooperative, charity-based solutions. These early third-party payers earned a profit by investing premiums in other profitable business ventures or by underwriting. They soon discovered that profitable...