The Committee for Economic Development announced earlier this month that they are endorsing the Wyden-Bennett Healthy Americans Act.
The HAA is a universal coverage, individual mandate program that delivers significant savings over the current system as well as most of the proposed reform initiatives.
The Committee is comprised of current and former business executives, including representatives from Wall Street, McKinsey, IHS Global Insight, Bausch&Lomb, Avaya, Burson Marseller, the Boston Consulting Group and others.
Notably, in a poll released yesterday by CED, sixty percent of business leaders polled agree that the current employer-based system is unsustainable.
They are right.
While my sense is a ‘passable’ reform bill will be based on the current system, my belief is that health coverage should not be linked to employment, as this limits portability, leads to job lock, and adds an unnecessary burden to most employers.
I’d add that the current system hasn’t worked to either improve health care quality or control prices. So expecting that a ‘new and improved’ employment based system will do better is rather speculative.
Jun
25
The workplace venue and culture are a proven and powerful force to achieve behavioral change, the single biggest opportunity for improving health at low cost. The new systems should incent businesses financially to improve workforce health. This will:
– decrease the amount of chronic disease, saving healthcare costs,
– decrease the cost of disability payments from government asssistance programs
– increase tax revenue and business profitabiliy by improving the health-related productivity of the workforce.
So, removing rather than enhancing the financial incentives for businesses to promote healthy lifestyles is foolish.
Certainly, linking coverage to employment should stop, that does not require severing the incentives for busnesses to encourage the health of their workforces, and their workers’ families.
Joe–
Whether we are looking at one system or several, employment based or otherwise, we should be paying attention to the study released by the OMB last week which pulls together a good deal of recent research which strongly suggests that– with a very few exceptions– health promotion and various types of wellness programs just do not save money by any measure. Any fiscal projections based on saving healthcare costs through chronic disease intervention/prevention may be very far off base indeed. The savings just aren’t there. More healthcare for more people simply equals more costs period. Check it out.