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Healthcare Reform follow this blog post

posted by on June 19, 2009

I'd love to hear how you feel about healthcare reform.

  • Should we preserve employer-based health insurance? Does this model still work with the rise in free agency, contractors, and job-hopping?
  • Should all Americans be required to buy health insurance, similar to the requirement in most states that drivers have car insurance?
  • America's premium system is expensive -- but arguably the world's best if you compare apples to apples. Should costs be controlled, so employers don't have frequent double-digit cost increases? If so, how? Would this hurt the quality of care, or mean rationing?
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4 comments

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  • 1 point 5 months ago

    Townhall (generally a conservative site) has an interesting article on who the uninsured are. Slate (generally liberal) has an interesting look at employer/employee mandates in Massachusetts.

  • 1 point 5 months ago

    Shalesh, I see what you're saying and agree with a lot of it. I'm wondering about pre-existing conditions, though. Would healthy people end up buying their own insurance, and people with a pre-existing condition and an insurance-providing job end up in group plans, where they can't be excluded? What if you had a condition, but not an insurance-providing job; you might not be able to get insurance, right? That's the problem under the status quo.

  • 1 point 5 months ago

    Health Insurance is a corporate recruiting tool that began after WWII to attract the potential workforce that returned from the war to come to work for a company that offered the benefit over the ones that did not.  Kaiser Permanente was grown from the benefit plan of the Kaiser Aluminum company.

    Prior to this time a Doctor made house calls and people were more responsible with the way they treated their bodies.

    I know that for the past 3 years that I have lived without insurance we have grown to a point of home first aid and negotiating with the Doctor a price for service on the way in the door.

     

    While the thought of having the headache of this way of living disappear is appealing; I would like the medical profession to be just that, a profession.  I have watched as politicians have consistantly made poor or selfish decisions for the whole of my life with issues from school systems to energy legislation.  I do not trust them with those decisions at all any more.  I personally don't want them making any more decisions for me until they remove the congressional pension plan that allows them to retire from elected service.

     

    I feel that the positions they fill should be temporary and outside of their profession, come in and doit for a while then leave.  I do not feel that our tax dollars should go to the retirement fund of the honorable gentleman or woman from some other state than mine which clearly means that you should not be granting retirement to any of them.

    The only thing that keeps a fresh perspective in the government is turning it over regularly.  I am certain that you can look back in history and see that the governments that are not regularly turned over are eventualy overturned.  The people should not be forced to work to support the retirement or lifetime health benefits of an elected force of selfish politicians.

    If we are trying to reduce the cost of healthcare then the best thing to do is not let the benefit be voted on by the recipient and not let the funding be based upon a simple increase in taxes to get it.  A trillion dollars are you kidding me?!

  • 1 point 5 months ago

    Todd, I agree with you that in terms of quality and timeliness, America's healthcare system is the best in the world.  (I know people will point to higher life expectancies in other countries and better outcomes on a few diseases, but overall our technology and doctors are unsurpassed.)  That we have the highest cost is not surprising since we do provide the highest quality and because users of healthcare are usually not the ones paying for healthcare.

    It seems obvious to many (including me) that having consumers exposed to the prices of healthcare, rather than being buffeted by a gov't or employer payer, would drive consumption of healthcare down and thus drive the price of healthcare down.  Look at elective surgeries such as Lasik, whose prices have been driven down over time thanks to competition.  The way to gently ease people off of employer-based healthcare is to make those benefits taxable (or, at a minimum, make the gold-plated plans that offer more than the congressional health plan taxable) and then offer tax credits for people who buy their own insurance.  This would move us in the direction of removing any competitive disadvantage that employers face vis a vis foreign companies whose people are covered by a gov't system.  I think this competitive disadvantage is overstated since most of the money companies "save" by not offering healthcare would then be offered to employees as additional wages.

    Mandating individuals to buy health insurance then may not be necessary since they would be offered a tax credit which should at least cover high-deductible policies.  For people who pay more for better policies, insurers could provide discounts on premia based on better behavior such as quitting smoking and keeping weight down.  Safeway does this now for its employees.

    I think the wrong direction to go in, despite its good intentions, is more government involvement in healthcare.  Decisions about what to cover and what not to cover and how much to pay will become politicized.  That Medicare/Medicaid faces $38 Trillion in unfunded liabilities seems to me proof that gov't has not been able to "bend the cost curve."

    A free market system puts more burden on consumers to shop and be knowledgeable about healthcare decisions, but I think Americans can make these decisions and, as in all other goods and services, the market allocates much more efficiently than government can.