Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

The Health Insurance/care Pickle, Pt.4 -–  Then and now.

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Ms. Wilensky differs with the Obama health insurance/care plan on the issue of cutting back on health insurance/care spending. She favors slowing the health insurance/care growth process down, instead. Her take is that "The concern is how to slow the growth rate, not how to spend absolutely less." But on the issue of preventive care, she does agree that this is important. She points out, though, that this area doesn’t need a lot of attention since, some employers are already starting to encourage healthier behaviors by offering smoking cessation and weight loss programs.

To further the divide, Mr. Obama is beefing things up in other health insurance/care areas, as well. He wants to initiate “some big-ticket federal intervention” in medical care administration like a “cohesive system for electronic medical records,” as Ms. Fox informs us. Mr. Obama would aggressively jump in with a $50 billion backing to see it through, as explained by Mr. Cutler. How does Mr. Obama plan to raise this large sum of capital? By raising everyone’s taxes? His health insurance/care strategy has a ready plan, whereby over 90% of our population would see no tax increase. The funding would be provided by allowing the Bush admin’s extreme landslide tax break to expire. This break only rewards a tiny percentage of our population (those being paid over $250 million per year). Perhaps only one person out of every 100 citizens would notice a tax increase. That amount is said to exceed $60 million.

Both advisors endorse the findings of the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit group. The Rand study was able to project that the “widespread use of electronic health records could save up to $77 billion a year, in part by preventing errors.” Mr. Cutler expounded, also, on the changes in the “political climate” since 1993 and 1994 during the President Bill Clinton days to today. Back then, Mr. Cutler was part of both the National Economic Council and also the Council of Economic Advisers. At that time, major health insurance/care reform efforts were, primarily, led by Hillary, the first lady at the time. The initiative at that time failed for many reasons. One was that it was too complicated. Also, it was too radical for the not-yet hard-pressed millions. Cutler believes that one of the biggest failures was because “"Corporate CEOs have not traditionally been involved in the health care debate. They ought to be involved. They're paying for this stuff."