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November 2, 2009

Pay Attention to the Health Care Debate: It Can Restructure Your Company

By Kennedy Maize

Companies that offer health insurance plans to their employees—and that covers most power companies—need to focus on the current congressional debates about national health insurance plans and on the potential outcomes of whatever is eventually adopted. Much of the sound and fury over the Obama (and congressional) plans last summer was bogus, kicked up by folks who want to sink the administration—much as the ill-designed Clinton health care plan in 1993 nearly derailed that Democratic administration.

But the intelligent opposition to various plans and approaches was not entirely political carnival, and the specifics are important. They will be played out in detail as the year comes to an end, when Congress will likely adopt some form of reform.

Noise and Obfuscation

President Obama’s speech in September to the joint session of Congress dispelled the more apocalyptic August angst about “Obamacare.” The bogus “Death panels,” insuring illegal aliens (we won’t insure them, but we will treat them when they are sick or injured, and we will all pay for that), and “rationing” by government bureaucrats were all phony-baloney stuff.

In particular, the complaint of “rationing” raised by opponents was entirely irrelevant. As any manager of a company health care plan knows, rationing is what private insurance companies do routinely. They ration by income, prior condition, the cost of procedures, and the insurance company’s bottom line—all of which affect the costs of company health care plans. The doctrine of preexisting conditions, long employed by health insurance companies, is classic rationing, as a way to prevent costs and preserve profits.

The ranters about “socialized medicine” didn’t understand that about a third or more of all Americans already get their health insurance through the federal government in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, the Indian Health Service, the military system, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan (including members of Congress), and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The complaint that federal bureaucrats will be making health care decisions ignores that profit-driven insurance bureaucrats now routinely make health care decisions about what the plan will cover and the doctor can do. These are not often medical decisions.

I’m a Medicare recipient, so I benefit from “socialized medicine.” Republicans, in the form of a totally cynical Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, now say they want to protect me from any reforms (meaning price increases or benefit reductions) of Medicare, because, in part, Medicare is irrational and inefficient. Huh? I heard Steele on a National Public Radio interview; he was simply offering incoherent partisan bafflegab.