The debate over various "Medicare for All" plans has gripped the presidential primary contest.
ADVERTISEMENTWASHINGTON — Across months of debates, stump speeches, TV appearances and position papers, the face of everything wrong with the U.S. health care industry for Democratic candidates has mostly come down to two groups: Private insurers and pharmaceutical companies.
But in focusing on those two industries, candidates may be leaving supporters unprepared for the fight it would take to pass Medicare for All or create a new public insurance option. In fact, Democratic proposals already face opposition from well-funded groups representing doctors, specialists and hospitals, many of which would be asked to accept major revenue cuts to finance expanded coverage.
While Democrats are comfortable attacking bureaucrats, CEOs and Big Pharma, public campaigns to block legislation are likely to include more sympathetic figures from voters' own communities like Dr. Asim Shah, executive vice chair and professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine.
Shah, who oversees about 90 staff at a trauma center in Houston and is known locally for his work treating Hurricane Harvey survivors, co-wrote an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle last month warning of "the perils of dismantling the existing structures and moving directly to a government-run plan."
Shah told NBC News that he's not ideologically opposed to a government-led approach, but he's concerned with a simple reality: Medicare pays providers less than private insurance and almost every 2020 Democratic plan looks to bring down soaring costs by tying more coverage to Medicare.
"Their reimbursement rates are not high," he said. "That's the reason some are scared."
The gap is especially large at hospitals, where a RAND analysis found private insurers pay more than twice as much on averagefor similar care.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren's much-anticipated Medicare for All plan anticipates lowering health care spending by trillions of dollars by moving physicians to Medicare rates, reimbursing hospitals at an average 110 percent of Medicare rates, and instituting reforms that would cap the growth of health care costs moving forward.
Single-payer advocates argue doing away with private insurance would reduce administrative burdens for doctors and hospitals, meaning they would be able to treat more patients for less. The U.S. is a major outlier among developed countries when it comes to its high health care costs, and some outside analyses of Medicare for All proposals suggest it could produce significant savings by negotiating lower prices and cutting overhead.
Donald Berwick, who oversaw Medicare and Medicaid under President Barack Obama and consulted on Warren's plan, said her reimbursement rates were calculated to cover current operating margins for hospitals, but would make it harder for them to bargain for higher rates in the future.
"It's definitely stringent, and it would really require hospitals to look very carefully inside for efficiencies, but they should be doing that anyway," Berwick said.
Rival approaches short of Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All proposals would also require new savings from health care providers.
Many candidates are proposing a public insurance option that pays some variation on Medicare rates in part to pressure private insurers to compete with lower premiums and spur providers to lower their prices. South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg has proposed limiting how much hospitals can charge private insurers relative to Medicare.
In a preview of the fight, Congress is currently struggling to advance legislation to address the sometimes shockingly high and confusing out-of-network hospital bills that patients receive — a much less daunting issue with bipartisan interest, including from the White House — amid an onslaught of outside spending.
A new group called Doctor Patient Unity popped up in July and spent over $28 million on ads opposing it through the summer, more than Warren's presidential campaign raisedin the last quarter. Its funders were initially unclear, but The New York Times revealed they were private-equity companies invested in health care.
Industry groups opposing Medicare for All are making the case that they need higher private insurance rates to make up for lower government ones and that customers will suffer from any reductions. The American Hospital Association decried Warren's proposal, arguing "hospitals are already paid far less than the cost of caring for Medicare patients" and that further cuts "could threaten access to care and hospitals' survival."
Partnership for America's Health Care Future, an umbrella group of health care trade groups that oppose single-payer health care or a public option, has commissioned outside studies raising concerns about the impact of lower reimbursement rates on hospitals struggling with revenue.
"If you assume and put all the population onto Medicare under current reimbursement rates or create a public option that shifts people to current reimbursement rates, you would find the current system we have today in our hospitals would not be able to continue to function," Lauren Crawford Shaver, executive director of the Partnership for America's Health Care Future, said in an interview.
ADVERTISEMENTThis crucial fight has been almost entirely overshadowed in the 2020 contest by arguments over replacing existing private insurance with a government plan. To the extent that health care providers have come up, they've often been cast as heroes held back by the existing system.
"People don't like their private insurance companies, they like their doctors and hospitals," Sanders said during the first Democratic debate. "We will substantially lower the cost of healthcare in this country because we will stop the greed of the insurance companies and the drug companies."
A rare exception came in the same debate, when John Delaney, a former health care executive, warned single-payer plans would lead to hospital closures or reductions in staff.
"They're going to move everyone to a government payment system and then realize they'll have to raise rates," Delaney told NBC News. "We could have a lower-cost health care system, but it would probably come with limitations on access and limitations on quality."
Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, said voters are receptive to the notion that segments of the industry are gouging customers, but that candidates needed to be careful in framing the debate.
ADVERTISEMENT"People have mixed views about hospitals, it depends on how they get positioned," she said. "If you say 'the for-profit health care industry,' that's a negative frame that can include hospitals and specialists. If it's your family doctor, that's pretty problematic."
The debate over Medicare payments is more complicated than a simple across-the-board cut. The new system could also boost compensation for many doctors and hospitals, creating winners and losers and a scramble of industry lobbying to be on the right side of the equation.
Hospitals with large numbers of patients who are uninsured or on Medicaid, which pays lower rates than Medicare, could benefit from the change. Warren's plan proposes raising Medicare payments for primary care doctors and cutting them for specialists, who some health care experts argue have too much leverage in price negotiations.
The American Medical Association, the top industry lobbying group for doctors, opposes Medicare for All, but its members are closely divided on the issue and they nearly voted to change their position in August. AMA withdrew from Partnership for America's Health Care Future shortly afterward.
"Nobody is soaking the doctors or the hospitals," said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, co-founder of single-payer advocates Physicians for a National Health Care Program. "It doesn't mean you won't get people who feel they would be less profitable and make less money under the new system."
ADVERTISEMENTGrumbling by individual industry players could potentially be solved by raising rates or backing off proposed reforms.
Under President Obama, for example, Democrats held off on aggressive changes to drug companies in the Affordable Care Act and instead cut a deal to neutralize one major industry threat while imposing bigger changes on others. Legislators in Washington state created a public insurance option this year, but set its reimbursement rates at 160 percent of Medicare, only a modest drop from private insurance, in order to address concerns from health care providers.
But finding a politically and technically workable way to finance the more expansive Medicare for All is difficult. Backing off on cost-cutting measures could raise the price tag by trillions of dollars, making it hard to appease any one group with a quick fix.
"Warren saying everyone has to take a hit is probably the right thing," Dr. Stephen Klasko, CEO of Jefferson Health, told NBC News. "How the public accepts it, how it gets done and what it does for the country hasn't been articulated yet."