As healthcare costs continue to climb and consolidation accelerates across the industry, one ASC executive says the solution policymakers keep overlooking is competition.
Dan Tasset, founder and chairman of Leawood, Kan.-based NueHealth, joined Becker’s that empowering patients with real choices and price signals, not subsidies or consolidation, is the key to lowering costs and improving quality.
Editor’s note: This interview was edited lightly for clarity and length.
Dan Tasset: The way I like to look at what we’re doing is this: we’re preparing the partners we manage for value-based care readiness — although everybody uses the term “value-based care” too much.
What we’re really doing is preparing them to compete in a value-based world. That means increasing quality, lowering cost and guaranteeing their product. That’s what we’re about. That’s how we’re different, and that’s the direction this country is going in healthcare delivery.
When I look at the debate in Congress right now — especially around what to do with the 20 million-plus Americans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges — it really saddens me that policymakers and regulatory bodies can’t see what every other part of the American economy embraces, which is competition.
You can subsidize state exchanges all you want. I don’t care if it’s Republican or Democrat — that’s not the issue. It’s a logical issue. You can subsidize exchanges all you want, but subsidies raise costs. Only competition lowers costs.
If you’re just lowering premiums and subsidizing premiums, you still have a problem. You have to lower the underlying cost of care. And there’s only one thing that does that, and that’s competition.
When I see hospital consolidation and other anti-competitive behaviors, we’re moving in the wrong direction. If we don’t do something quickly, we’re going to end up with a two-tier healthcare system like much of Europe.
That saddens me, because I believe the fix is really simple: embrace competition among providers, give patients real empowerment, real buying power and real incentives, and give them real price tags — not these price transparency laws that nobody pays attention to, and even if they do, they can’t figure them out anyway.
