Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

The Real Problem of Covering the ‘Uninsured’, Pt.14 – The most striking truth.

Previous…

3) Employers may continue to provide health insurance to workers as usual. But, should they decline and not provide health insurance for their workers, they will have two other choices:

             a) They can either ‘meaningfully’ contribute to health insurance costs for their employees,
 or
              b) Submit to a 4% payroll tax that will be used to subsidize health insurance for moderate income and below families.

4) Mr. O proposes to expand Medicare, SCHIP and other public avenues, such as a “national health insurance exchange” system. This new ‘exchange will a government-regulated health insurance market.

5) Health insurance for children will be made mandatory.

6) Like Mr. McC and the Massachusetts model, Mr. proposes cost and efficiency controls. They are, actually very extensive.

Of course, there will always be unknowns when so much depends on human behavior. For any comprehensive plan to be successful. it must be able to accommodate adaptability without giving up it’s primary justification. The purpose of this article was not another rehash of a hundred similar articles. It is to illuminate the invisible ‘tidal forces’ that sway and control outcomes, largely unknown to the general public. Some of the ‘invisible’ forces’ are:

1) Shifts in paying and receiving between government, industry and the public sector.
2) Shifts in authority and regulation.
3) Redistribution and inequity issues.
4) Political and economic obstacles, not even directly related to medical arena.

The best summation this writer has found is delivered by Henry Aaron in his excellent article “Cheap At Twice The Price”, posted on http://healthaffairs.org/blog on August 25th, 2008: “Achieving universal coverage is mostly about income redistribution—among politically and economically powerful payers and providers with stakes that dwarf those measured by the added system-wide cost of insuring everyone.”