Health: too important to be left to the healthcare industry

Brian Nelson writes: 

That our payment incentives have had the unintended consequence of often harming patients has been recognized by payers (government included) and efforts are underway to change. Can we devise a system that pays for outcomes rather than paying for services regardless of effectiveness? Unless we do, I fear things will not change. A review by Brian W Nelson (orthopaedic surgeon), of Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery, 21 May

There's an idea: pay for favourable health outcomes, rather than activities or institutions purporting to deliver those outcomes, but at least as concerned for their own well-being as those of the people they are supposed to be helping. We see this not only in orthopaedics, but in other areas of physical and mental health. There's nothing particularly startling about this: practitioners have their own families to support, and are reacting perfectly rationally to the incentives on offer. And those incentives encourage over-screening and over-treatment, and the neglect of commercially nonnviable preventive interventions. As the British Medical Association puts it, in a recent paper:

Despite the clear acknowledgement across the UK of the need to prioritise ill-health prevention and public health activities, the data analysed in this briefing show this is not matched by funding commitments. Funding for ill-health prevention and public health in the UK (pdf), British Medical Association, 2017

It's the same, or worse, in the US:

Almost 1.3 million people went to U.S. emergency rooms due to adverse drug effects in 2014, and about 124,000 people died from those events. [R]research suggests that up to half of those events were preventable. ... An estimated $200 billion per year is spent in the U.S. on the unnecessary and improper use of medication, for the drugs themselves and related medical costs.... Too many meds?, Teresa Carr, 'Consumers Reports', dated September 2017

It's time for a new approach. My suggestion is that rather than policymakers' focusing on the means by which they think good health can be achieved, they instead focus on targets for good physical and mental health, and provide incentives for people to achieve those targets. The Social Policy Bond concept, applied to health, would do this, and more: it would inject the market's incentives and efficiencies into all the processes necessary to improve a nation's health. Health Bonds would channel our scarce resources into the most efficient means of improving our health, including those currently neglected or not even considered by our current healthcare bodies, most of which have little incentive or capacity to consider broad health outcomes that fall outside their increasingly specialised remit.

Health Bonds wouldn't stipulate how our health goals shall be achieved, nor who shall achieve them. This allows a broader approach. For example: our current compartmentalised accountancy-driven policy approach would not take into consideration the adverse health impacts of subsidising advanced courses for young drivers of motorbikes or cars. But holders of Health Bonds would look at such measures, investigate their possible health impacts, and make an informed decision as to whether any improvement they might bring to the nation's health is worthwhile, compared to other possible interventions.