The Kaiser Family Foundation is one of the most reliable and comprehensive source of healthcare data and analysis in the U.S. Its authority rests in part on maintaining an implicit policy neutrality, letting facts speak for themselves. But sometimes facts speak loudly, and that's the case with a remarkable brief detailing the extent to which the United States' failure to set payment rates for providers, or compel all payers to negotiate common rates, drives our out-of-control spending on healthcare, and our failure to provide affordable access to all.
The brief is an emperor-has-no-clothes declaration, aggregating facts well known to healthcare scholars and simply spotlighting the consequences of our collective failure -- unique among wealthy countries -- to curb the market (and political!) power of hospitals and doctors by forcing them to deal with all payers as a unit. It's a slingshot aimed at an industry Goliath preparing a nuclear arsenal of lobbying and propaganda against any initiative that aims to expand the footprint of government payment rates.
