Business Coalition for Single Payer
Healthcare
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Why should businesses support single-payer healthcare?
Because it makes good business sense.
Forget that a single-payer system -- like Canada's or our own Medicare system -- is in the best interest of the public. It is also a windfall for businesses and their bottom line, and it benefits our nation's jobs and economy. So why don't we have it today?
Health care is consuming 16% of our gross domestic product and it will grow to 20% over the next decade. If we were achieving better medical outcomes in the process, we could perhaps tolerate the higher costs. But we aren't. The World Health Organization has the U.S. ranked at 37% in overall efficiency and effectiveness. The recent study by the Commonwealth Fund mirrors the WHO results.
Our neighbor, Canada, is ranked 5th by WHO and has life expectancies two years longer than ours, infant mortality 35% lower than ours, and they perform twice the per-capita kidney transplants than we do, all with an overall cost of 10% of GDP and covering 100% of their population rather than our 85%.
What's not to like about that?
Yes, they have longer wait times for elective procedures, and they could eliminate even those if they'd allocate another 10% to their system, upping their total costs to 11% of GDP. Their wait times for urgent procedures are the same as in the U.S., virtually zero.
Why don't they go for 11%, you ask? For the same reason we don't fix healthcare here in the U.S. It's called politicians, and in our case they are heavily rewarded by the insurance and drug industries to keep the system inefficient, broken, and soon to be even more profitable and less accessible.
American health care has become a very profitable market commodity, and those making the profits are willing to share them with the politicians who make it all happen. Clearly the insurance industry has much at stake in this process, and they are investing heavily just to keep their cut of the pie. And what better way than to form business groups that unwittingly call for "mandated health insurance" like those that passed in Massachusetts and are proposed in California. They also get insurance executives on the boards of non-healthcare corporations to guide their directors away from a system that eliminates the industry's cut.
Think General Motors, who now makes more cars in Canada than the U.S., because their costs are just $800 per year per employee for health care.
Good business practices would suggest that eliminating the unnecessary middle man, creating the largest possible purchasing pool (all 300 million of us), and negotiating prices, would save massive dollars. And it would.
To paraphrase a famous quote, "America will always do the right thing, but only after failing at everything else."
And we are holding true to that. We will ultimately have a single-payer system, but how long will the for-profit interests will be able to delay it, and how much profits will they pocket during the delay? How many businesses will suffer or fail as a result in the meantime? How many jobs will be outsourced because of exorbitant health care costs?
American business leaders must recognize that the one part of the system that could eliminate 31% of the drain on healthcare is the bureaucracy necessary to keep the insurance industry in the loop. This system is dispensable and not needed to get the job done.
There are over 1500 health insurance companies, each with scores of different insurance plans, high broker commissions, high executive salaries, actuarial costs, the costs of gatekeepers to deny care, marketing costs and the profits to keep shareholders content. Even their lobbying and campaign contributions are added to their price and the consumer ultimately pays the bill. Add to that the extra administrative personnel hospitals and clinics must have to manage the billing system, and you've got enormous unnecessary costs.
Why are business leaders so generous with the insurance industry? Mostly because they don't know their alternatives nor make their voice heard.
All of this waste could be eliminated if there existed the political will, and fewer dollars being passed to the politicians to fund their campaigns. Or, a strong business contingent.
Though it's not perfect, the most efficient and caring system we have is Medicare, and we should expand it to cover 100% of the population and improve it to cover everything we need and get rid of the stuff we don't. Medicare is not socialized Medicine, because all hospitals and physicians remain in private ownership. It uses a private corporation in each state to administer claims, though the funds come from an efficient single risk pool: the taxpayers. It would provide first class health coverage to 100% of the people, folding in all unemployed, Medicaid and other government-funded health programs. It'd also greatly reduce auto insurance and worker compensation costs.
Businesses would no longer provide health care, though under the current proposal they would pay an additional 3.3% healthcare tax on payroll. But this would be more than offset by the 10-15% of wages they'd no longer have to pay for health benefits. Workers would also be taxed an additional 3.3%, but this would be offset by the elimination of co-pays, deductibles, and the costs for prescription drugs, mental health, long-term care, vision and dental. And it would be portable, so employees changing jobs would no longer suffer delays and costs for COBRA, which often is picked up by the new employer.
We'd have a Cadillac system for the same 16% of GDP we are spending today, and we'd make businesses more competitive with their foreign competitors and keep more jobs in the United States. And we'd improve the economy as families would have more money to spend on products and services. The bankruptcy attorneys might not like it because over 50% of bankruptcies are due to health care costs, but they'll survive. More importantly, so will the 18,000 Americans who die prematurely because they have no health care at all.
Okay, so you are ideologically against the government being involved, even though Medicare has been the most successful public-private venture ever? The alternative is not good when you look at the long term effects on the economy. The insurance industry will survive elsewhere, but it makes no sense creating make-work to keep them in the loop and unnecessarily drain revenues from other businesses. Yes, per-capita costs of our current Medicare are higher, but that's because it almost exclusively covers higher-cost seniors and end-of-lifers for nearly 100% of its subscribers. Nonetheless, the "system" is sound, and when we fold in all of the younger age groups it will be unbeatable.
A new group, the Business Coalition for Single Payer Healthcare, hopes to change all this through the education of business leaders and the pressuring of politicians to do the right thing. Its full support will be given to HR676, a House proposal by U.S. Rep. John Conyers which now has more Congressional supporters than any other bill. At the state level is the Miller-Benedict Health Security Act that deserves equal support.
Business leaders must study these sound options and make their voices heard.
Jack E. Lohman Retired business owner Business Coalition for Single Payer Healthcare Lohman can be reached at jlohman@execpc.com
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