How Real Health Care Reform Can Save Detroit
There is a bank bailout, a mortgage aid plan, an automaker rescue, a healthcare access proposal.
But sometimes the solutions may be better conceived through a unified approach.
The near
bankruptcy of the automakers which has alarmed us in recent days points to the
nexus between multiple problems and their solutions. While
Of the various economic burdens faced by the automakers none is larger or more ongoing than that presented by health care costs. This has become the focus of ongoing conflict with labor unions as workers face economic and health insecurity. Health care cost add nearly $2000 to the price of each automobile, making competition with foreign automakers increasingly problematic.
For individuals, health care costs are the number one reason for lack of insurance, contribute to the majority of bankruptcies, and are a factor in over one quarter of home foreclosures.
Although President-elect Obama has proposed to include health care finance reform as a central part of his domestic agenda, his proposals so far offer nothing to cash strapped businesses. Indeed, the employer mandate he has offered will only add to the cost of doing business.
The solution to this problem lies in linking health care reform to economic incentive and providing truly universal coverage while reducing our national expenditures for health care.
The current private insurance based health care system has become a bureaucratic nightmare of buck-passing and profiteering. It is rife with waste that has nothing to do with providing quality comprehensive health care. Indeed, only some 65% of health insurance premiums are spent on health care. Instead, insurance company executives earn hundreds of millions of dollars while corporate marketing departments spend fortunes selling insurance to the healthy just as their utilization departments resist paying for the care of those who become ill.
Rather than inviting a mandate that business pay to expand this wasteful system, the economic crisis offers the new President the opportunity most other reformers have not had--the chance to begin from scratch. The American people have voiced an overwhelming desire for change. We have come to understand that business as usual isn't always good business and that the business models that private systems create don't always work in the public interest.
Turning to Medicare, the second pillar of our current national health financing system, the President and Americans can envision another alternative. With centralized funding and near universal enrollment of the population it serves, Medicare provides better quality care and higher satisfaction at a substantially lower cost than the private health system. Paling before the bloated bureaucracy of its private cousin, Medicare's administrative costs are only 3% of its funding. No surprise, as there are no resources spent on avoiding care for the sick, marketing, investor relations, or corporate profits.
Abandoning a private health insurance system for an improved Medicare For All would immediately result in dramatic savings to our nation's health care bill. But to truly help the struggling business sector the financing of this system, ideally with a new and progressive tax, could be phased in over a several year period as an economic stimulus.
Businesses which now fund health care as a cost on their bottom line could immediately eliminate that cost, with the bill being paid through a combination of temporary deficit spending and a widely distributed low tax levied on consumption or as part of a revised and simplified income tax reform.
Eliminating the a multitude of public and private programs which currently pay for segmented components of health care, eliminating our national sense of insecurity about paying for health care, eliminating all parts of the health care bureaucracy that don't directly relate to providing care, a move towards Medicare for All provides a way to solve our automakers' crisis, and our own.
