It has always amazed me how elected officials and the media create such furors over issues that have very simple, inexpensive solutions. In an August 11, 2009 Wall Street Journal article “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare: Eight Things We Can Do to Improve Healthcare Without Adding to the Deficit”, John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, Inc., provides very efficient suggestions on how to lower healthcare costs that requires neither a monolithic government bureaucracy nor the all-seeing eye of the IRS enforcing it:
“1. Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health care problems. Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health care dollars through deposits into employees Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness. Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. ……Our plan’s costs are much lower than typical health insurance while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.
2. Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.
3. Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able to use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable. [the prime directive that competition drives down costs while maintaining quality service!]
4. Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is and is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special interest lobbying.
5. Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.
6. Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health care treatments cost. [TriCare for military and retirees did this. United HealthCare – the ObamaCare company that took over TriCare- does not. If fact, UHC has begun sending letters to some veterans that their request for services has been denied].
7. Enact MediCare reform. We need to face up to the actuarial fact that MediCare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility. [Congress would rather poke themselves in the eye with a pencil than tackle this one – too many special interest groups hit the panic button on this one. Therefore, MediCare will go bankrupt.]
8. Revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make voluntary, tax-deductible donations to help millions of people who have no insurance and aren’t covered by MediCare, MediCaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
For those who tout Canada and England as model health insurance nations, Canada (whose population is less than California) has a waiting list of 830,000 Canadians waiting for admission into a hospital or to get treatment. England’s waiting list is 1.8 million patients waiting….and waiting.
Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending – heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity – are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking,……etc.”
Just making smarter choices about our life style can improve our health and reduce health care costs! Too easy! At least it was until the ‘60s counter-culture idiom “Do it if it feels good. Do it if it’s what you feel” became legislative and judicial policy. I read where many of our congressional representatives and their staffers are thinking of quitting so they don’t have to pay the same costs as we taxpayers are required to pay under ObamaCare. Those who voted it without reading it and imposed it upon we who keep them in office don’t want to share in the “benefit.” The media worries a mass exodus would create a brain drain within the beltway. That sounds like a byte in a Jay Leno monologue. A law should be passed prohibiting “staffers” from using their revolving door between working for special interest lobbyists then working as tax payer funded, full-time “staffers” for congressmen. The incest is pandemic. It is not our letters and calls that dictate policy, it is the special interest/staffers that whisper in the ears of politicians.
And while we are looking for cures, hire about five thousand organizational behavior graduate interns to work summers for the government ferreting out fraud, waste and abuse. Give them enforcement authority. Continue the efforts of the Grace Report (see related blog) with teeth in it. That would solve the national debt in one year and shrink the federal government to the dwarf it needs to be.
