Posted on Dec. 11: Mini-symposium to explore policy roles in health care

If Canada allows private funding of healthcare, administration costs will skyrocket, warns Steffie Woolhandler, a leading health policy researcher from Harvard Medical School.

Woolhandler will discuss her recent publication in the New England Journal of Medicine during a mini-symposium Dec. 16, at McMaster University.

Her talk Profits from Pain: A Story of Health Care in the U.S. will be preceded by the lecture Your Money and Your Life, by P.J. Devereaux and Public and Private Roles in Health Care: Trying to Make Sense of the Confusion by Jeremiah Hurley, both of McMaster.

The mini-symposium is sponsored by the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis.

Woolhandler will make a detailed presentation of her recent work on health care administrative costs in the U.S. and Canada, which was published in August 2003 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study, which she conducted with David Himmelstein (Harvard Medical School) and Terry Campbell (Canadian Institute for Health Information), found that U.S. administrative costs in U.S. health care consume at least 31 cents of every health care dollar. Canada spends about 16.7 per cent of its health care dollars on administration.

This work provides detailed estimates on health administrative spending by insurance companies, private employers, hospitals, nursing homes, doctor's offices, and home care agencies. Woolhandler will discuss both the methodological issues and policy implications of this work.

She will also present, more briefly, an ongoing study on the role of illness and medical bills in causing consumer bankruptcies in the United States. The study has found that illness causes (in whole or in part) about half of the 1.5 million personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. annually. Most persons experiencing medical bankruptcy were middle class by occupational and educational criteria, and had health insurance at the onset of their illness.

Devereaux, a cardiologist at McMaster University, will discuss his research which demonstrates inpatients being treated at investor owned private for-profit hospitals and outpatients being treated at investor owned private for-profit dialysis centres have higher risk adjusted mortality rates than patients being treated at not-for-profit hospitals and dialysis centres, respectively.

Hurley is a health economist in the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis (CHEPA) at McMaster University. His talk will focus on a recent research project he led that developed a conceptual framework for public and private roles with respect to health care financing.

This mini-symposium will take place Tuesday, Dec. 16 in the Health Sciences Centre, Rm. 1A1, from 2-5 p.m.