Why Arizona health care is so expensive

• Doctors and insurance companies aren't the villains in our health-care drama
• Politicians and bureaucrats are responsible for our ailing health-care system
• Doctors and patents need to seize power from bureaucrats

In my 36 years as a practicing physician, there have been few constants, but one of them is health care's ever-increasing price tag.

I was reminded of this recently by the news that Arizonans will face another round of premium increases in 2015. Arizonans will pay an average of 11.2 percent more for individual plans sold over the marketplace ("Report: Arizona's ACA plans to hike rates 21 percent," Aug. 21).

It's important to understand what is driving these price increases. Contrary to what many politicians say, doctors aren't to blame. Neither are insurance companies, typically cast by politicians as the villains in the American health-care drama.

Much of the blame actually lies with the politicians and the bureaucrats they've empowered over decades of health-care "reforms." They wrap doctors, insurers and the entire health-care industry in burdensome regulations — red tape that dramatically increases health-care costs.

Politicians have been wrapping health care in red tape for generations. When Washington or our state government passes a health-care reform bill, they usually establish a new government agency or commission with sweeping authority to dictate how doctors and insurers operate, what services we can and can't provide, and how we must report what we do back to the government.

These laws are passed and these agencies are presumably established with the best of intentions. Unfortunately, the regulatory burden they create is a major contributing factor in health care's constantly increasing costs.

Consider the Affordable Care Act.

Passed in 2010, the law commonly known as "Obamacare" empowered bureaucrats in Washington to rewrite large sections of American health-care law. After two years, they had already created some 13,000 pages of regulation. They have written and promulgated many thousands — perhaps tens of thousands —more since then.

These regulations are substantial. They affect what happens in treatment and waiting rooms, the operating room, and everywhere in between. Doctors, insurers, and health-care workers must understand and follow them to the letter. If not, we physicians face fines, possible license revocation or possible criminal charges.

But it isn't easy to understand what the regulations mean. Bureaucratic language is not plain English. So armies of personnel and lawyers are hired to help us figure out and implement them. It takes another army to fill out the paperwork, file it, and fax it between offices, insurance companies and the government agencies that ultimately pull the strings.

Everyone who's ever been to a doctor's office knows this. There are dozens of employees behind the front desk. There's also a wall, or maybe an entire room, full of files that are increasingly being sent between offices and government agencies.

The whole system is incredibly complex and expensive to maintain. Complying with government health-care regulations cost untold billions of dollars every year. Medicare and Medicaid alone can take up some 40 percent of the overhead costs in the average doctor's practice. Insurance companies must deal with comparable regulatory burdens.

All of these costs are reflected in your premiums.

And this problem has created a vicious cycle in American health care. As health care became more expensive, politicians passed Obamacare to fix it. Yet the law only made the problem worse by cementing health care in even more regulation and expense.

Arizonans learned this the hard way over the past year. When Obamacare first went into effect earlier this year, premiums on our state's open market health-care plans —the plans purchased on healthcare.gov — increased by 51 percent. Washington tried to undo some of the damage with further regulation in recent months, yet now premiums are expected to increase by a further 11 percent in 2015.

Further increases are inevitable, and neither doctors nor insurance companies can stop it. Health care will continue to get more expensive until physicians and patients take decision-making power back from bureaucrats. Only then can health care's costs be reined in.

Dr. John Ammon is an anesthesiologist who practices in Phoenix.