Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Health Insurance Fear vs. Other Fears, Pt.5 -- Gold Standard

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The second principle is that a new group market is created. Call it “the Health Care for America market”. In this new health insurance/care market, health insurers compete for the business of individuals and employers. These employers can buy their employees in for 6% of payroll. Thirdly, this group market has a strong public health insurance/care modeled after Medicare. This creates competition between private health insurance companies and this public offering. This public health insurer should be non-profit in order to be efficient and provide the most cost-effective and attractive options. The hope is to draw individuals and businesses alike to gravitate toward it. If all works well, this system should evolve and approach something like a single-payer system.

According to Mr. Klein, the most respected name in health insurance/care consulting right now is the Lewin Group. They are considered to be “the gold standard in health-care consulting”. This group, after analyzing this Hacker plan, came up with the estimate that it will save about $1.04 trillion over 10 years. Part of these savings will be gained through basic efficiencies, both administrative and technological. The greatest effect of this plan, however, is based on the “quiet cost controls” built into this new Health Care for America market group. This plan only allows the health insurance/care spending per enrollee to increase at a fixed rate for each respective year's GDP growth plus another half percent. This spending growth tends to be far slower than the rate of the private marketplace. If successful, the plan will bring about two effects:

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