The recent disagreement between Uwe Reinhardt and Sally Pipes in Forbes is a teachable moment. There’s a dearth of confrontational debates in health policy, and education is worse off for it.

Crux of the issue is the more efficient system: employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) or Medicaid. Sally Pipes, president of the market-leaning Pacific Research Institute, believes it is ESI. Employers spend 60% less than the government, per person: $3,430 versus $9,130, per person (according to the American Health Policy Institute). Seems like a no brainer.

Pipes credits “consumerist and market-friendly approaches to health insurance” for the efficiencies. She blames “fraud,” “improper payment,” and “waste” for problems in government-run components of health care.

But Uwe Reinhardt, economist at Princeton, counters that Medicaid appears inefficient because of the risk composition of its enrollees. Put simply, Medicaid recipients are sicker. Sicker patients consume more health care resources. Econ 101.

The points of tension in their disagreement are instructive.

Is ESI free market?

The term “consumerist” instinctively appeals to competition and choice, elements we value in free market. However, health care can’t be compared to shopping for single malt in airport duty free, deciding between Talisker 18 and Glenlivet 21.

ESI is hardly an assortment of private units functioning autonomously. ESI has been carved by so many regulations that government figuratively runs through its veins.

Do you wonder why insurers in ESI don’t surcharge a family with a child with Tetralogy of Fallot? That is increase their premiums astronomically or deny coverage because of a pre-existing condition.

Goodness of heart? No, it’s because of the government.

This means that young fit joggers are subsidizing the costs for the unfortunate child’s complex cardiac surgery. This is how insurance works. Redistribution. There’s no other civilized way.

Risk adjustment: Comparing apples and oranges

Failure to adjust for co-morbidities makes it difficult to make comparisons in quality, value and performance.

Not only are Medicaid enrollees sicker, they are poorer and less empowered. A priori they are a more “inefficient” group to deal with than the employed middle class.

I’ll hazard a guess that Sovaldi (medication for hepatitis C) won’t increase Microsoft’s health care bill as much as the state of Illinois’. One, of course, would not credit Microsoft’s cost savings to greater efficiency through clever free market insurance design.

However, in policy discussions comparisons between apples and oranges are commonplace.  Life expectancy and infant mortality are used to compare U.S. health care to countries such as Cuba or France, when adjudicators well know, or should know, that there is more nuance. Using metrics which can be affected by social determinants of health is misleading.

Is Medicaid an island?

There are no islands in health care.

It’s important not to make the same logical errors with Medicaid as with ESI.  Medicaid is not an autonomous government unit. Its recipients aren’t sent solely to safety net hospitals. For most parts Medicaid recipients share the same system as folks on ESI; a system which, arguably, has been sculpted by ESI, for better or worse.

This means there’s interdependence between ESI and Medicaid, or between a government-regulated and a government-regulated and run system.

Interdependence is evidenced by cost shifting, where costs of seeing Medicaid patients are shifted to ESI. Even if there is no convincing evidence of cost shifting, as Reinhardt cautions but Pipes disagrees with the caution, this interdependence is not diminished. Providers might happily see Medicaid patients knowing they can still enjoy good returns from ESI, without hospitals purposely shifting costs to ESI.

Politics, ideology and Medicaid

Medicaid is more than a system of reimbursing physicians. It has become an ideology. Any criticism of Medicaid leads to the unfortunate conclusion by some well-intentioned individuals that the purpose of critique is to send poor to workhouses.

Good intention does not mean access, though. Medicaid recipients have a problem of access. This is because Medicaid pays providers far too little whilst simultaneously imposing far too much red tape.

Given the structural problems of Medicaid I do wonder why the program was expanded and not replaced by Medicare. Who objected? What was the rationale for objection? Or was it never suggested?

Paying providers when caring for the sickest, poorest and most disenfranchised section of society the least for their efforts does no favors to that section of society.

Serve and volley at the margins

Both Reinhardt and Pipes cite several studies to support their point of view. One wonders whether policy wonks truly can form opinions solely from evidence, since it’s so easy to cite evidence to support one’s prior convictions and subconsciously disregard or criticize that which does not.

Disagreements are common because economics is not a hard science such as physics. It does not so much get us to the objective truth as it does to the action at the margins through methodology that is not as robust as in physical sciences, yielding different results on different occasions.

Who is correct, Reinhardt or Pipes?

In a sense both.

Reinhardt is right. Medicaid recipients are not the same as those enjoying ESI.

Pipes is right. Medicaid has structural issues. It pays physicians too little compared to ESI.

This begs the question which reimbursement corresponds to the fair market price in health care: Medicaid or ESI. We will never know because health care has not operated as a free market. And ESI does distort the “price signals,” as do mandates and virtually everything else.

But here is the important point: ESI is going nowhere. Neither the most left-leaning Democrat nor the most right-leaning Republican has the courage to rid health care of ESI.

What’s the objective truth? Which system really is more efficient?

The truth lies in the answer to this question: Would ESI deliver the level of care enjoyed by ESI recipients with paucity of cost sharing that Medicaid recipients face to Medicaid enrollees at a lower cost than Medicaid?

For Medicaid recipients cost sharing should be zero, otherwise it defeats the purpose of safety net. But remember we want them to have the same level of care as ESI for a true apples-apples comparison.

It’s practically impossible to conduct a randomized controlled trial to answer this question. Nor does empiricism suffice.

The best, though still markedly imperfect method, is the use of economic models. Models have assumptions. With regards to assumptions I can do no better than paraphrase Groucho Marx: “Those are my assumptions, and if you don’t like them … well I have others.”

Importance of disagreements

The current system does not have many genuine alternatives. Single-payer is out as is a genuine free market. As politicians don’t wish to talk about costs because of political expediency, all we are arguing about is which part of health care has the most administrative/ informational loss. This is a marginal argument, at best. To resolve this I would encourage more dialectic between partial truths.

Summary of key points

1. It’s more cost-efficient treating healthier patients.
2. Accurate adjustment for co-morbidities and social determinants of health is key for any comparisons in health care.
3. There’s interdependence between employer-sponsored insurance and Medicaid.
4. No one knows true market prices in health care because it’s not a free market by any stretch.
5. Economic analysis yields information about the margins, until the next analysis.

Saurabh Jha is a radiologist and can be reached on Twitter @RogueRad.