Today, I had two opportunities to bring up health care reform. One was when I went for my annual physical at mid-morning. Dr. Richard Sribnick, one of my internist’s partners, stopped to chat while I was in the lab fighting off the dizziness that always hits me when I have blood drawn (the nurse thanked him for distracting me).
He thanked me for running his recent op-ed piece — Dr. Sribnick has played a leading role in South Carolina’s effort to save Darfur — and offered the guess that I was getting a lot of feedback on my single-payer column. Sure, I said — and what was his opinion? Bottom line, he doubts that it’s the best way to go. He said he’d been at a meeting about new Medicaid rules the night before at a local hospital, and he thought the system sounded pretty messed up from a provider’s perspective.
But… he said that if the choice was between our current state of affairs and single-payer, he’d choose single-payer.
Earlier, our editorial board had met with representatives from the S.C. Chamber of Commerce. It was their annual "Competitiveness Agenda" meeting, at which they share with us their priorities for the coming legislative session.
Anyway, since they had been talking yet again about how competition today is truly international, I asked new chairman Jim Micali, chairman and president of Michelin North America, Inc., how S.C. businesses were affected by the fact that they have to pay for employee health care, while overseas competitors don’t shoulder that same burden.
His reply is contained in the video above.
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The Chamber stopped representing small business a long time ago. So their “single payer” stance is not surprising. For them, it is simply about shoving the cost of insurance onto the state.
Of course this coming from the same large business types that are busting their pension plans and shoveling those expenses to the government or back to the people that paid into the programs so that they would have a retirement pension.
This has little so with medical care, and everything to do with improving the bottom line.
First, Mr. Micali was not advocating “single-payer.” He was saying things that for me point in that direction, but he wasn’t saying that. No establishment types will say that. Note that Blue Cross-Blue Shield is a major financial supporter of Chamber activities.
That’s why I brought it up. The idea of “single-payer” makes sense to an awful lot of people who dare not mention it, for fear of being labeled “socialist” by ideologues — or for fear of alienating their friends.
Second, of course it’s about the bottom line, for businesses. They are not eleemosynary institutions. That’s my point in posting this. People want to have these grand ideological debates about national health, with folks asserting a “basic right to health care” on one side, and decrying “socialism” on the other. The truth is that a national health program makes pragmatic sense for capitalists as well as for workers. It’s hard to imagine anything we could do more likely to free up capital AND workers than to have universal health care. That eliminates a big expense for employers so that they can invest more productively in their businesses, and frees up workers to take risks, rather than clinging to jobs for the benefits.
> That eliminates a big expense for
> employers so that they can invest more
> productively in their businesses, and
> frees up workers to take risks, rather
> than clinging to jobs for the benefits
The single payer plan proposed by Dr. Demarco requires employers to pay 7% and employees to pay 2% into the program.
How does that eliminate a big expense? How does it prevent a company from having any control over the costs in the future when the government decides 7% and 2% is not enough?
The money isn’t going to materialize from thin air. Someone’s going to pay for this.
The simplest way for employers to eliminate the cost of providing medical benefits is to just quit offering it.
Congress could help by taxing the benefits as employee income, as it acutally is. Then they could make some other tax changes to encourge the free market to move back in and create a wide variety of individual and group plans so the workers will own their own insurance and retirement.
Big business doesn’t want that. They want employees to be dependent on the employer providing benefits, which are paid for with reductions in gross pay. That reduces the employer “contributions” to FICA and Medicare taxes.
In Germany, the workers own all their own insurance and retirement, so they can move freely from employer to employer. This makes the employers have to treat them better in many other ways than American companies.
I agree, Lee. Allow me to find my own insurance company through the marketplace.
Breaking the tie between job->employer->insurance company would be very helpful… especially instead of the proposed person->employer->government->medical provider plan.
The key change that the government CAN implement is creating regulations that prohibit insurance companies from revoking coverage or denying coverage… true portability without any limitations.
That wouldn’t cost the taxpayer a dime.
Big corporations and unions made ridiculous promises of insurance and retirement benefits which they knew they could not deliver, as a means of outbidding small companies which told the truth.
Now they want the taxpayers to bail them out. If they can shift their financial obligations to the sham of socialized medicine, they don’t care how sorry it is or how soon it collapses. The executives and union bosses have extracted enough money for their own retirement and private insurance.
Anyone who advocates government takeover of the medical industry is a socialist.
If they don’t want to be called a socialist, at least they recognize socialism is wrong. Maybe they even feel guilty for trying to shirk personal responsibility.
Anyone who advocates government takeover of the medical industry is a socialist.
If they don’t want to be called a socialist, at least they recognize socialism is wrong. Maybe they even feel guilty for trying to shirk personal responsibility.