Health Care For All?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Health Care
That’s many people’s dream, and an Oregon Senator is offering a plan that may make it a reality.
WASHINGTON (AP) â€â€? A dozen years after Congress rejected a Clinton administration plan for universal health care, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden is readying a proposal to provide health care coverage to all Americans through a pool of private insurance plans. [...]Wyden’s proposal, which he planned to unveil on Wednesday, is an outgrowth of work by the Citizens’ Health Care Working Group, a 14-member panel that went to 50 communities around the country and heard from 28,000 people about how to reform health care. [...]
Wyden said his plan would allow workers to carry their health insurance from job to job without penalty and would cost the federal government no more than it’s paying today for health insurance coverage. It would cover all Americans except those on Medicare or those who receive health care through the military.
So, how do we do it?
Called the “Healthy Americans Act,” the plan would require that employers “cash out” their existing health plans by terminating coverage and paying the amount saved directly to workers as increased wages. Workers then would be required to buy health insurance from a large pool of private plans.After two years, companies would no longer have to pay the higher wages. Instead, Wyden said, they would pay into an insurance pool, based on annual revenues and the number of full-time workers.
The Lewin Group, a Virginia-based health care consulting firm that reviewed Wyden’s plan, said it would reduce health spending by private employers by nearly three-quarters, and would save $1.4 trillion in total national health care spending over the next decade.
Increases in premium payments for individuals and families would be offset by higher wages and subsidies provided under the plan, the report said. As an example, Wyden cited a worker who earned $60,000 last year, and received about $12,000 worth of health care coverage.
It seems sensible, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 and is filed under Health Care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 14th, 2006 at 12:29 am
Hey, thanks for the post!
I’m helping Senator Wyden with his netroots site on this – Stand Tall for America.
I’d encourage your to actually head on over to the site and read about the plan. Obviously, there are going to be a lot of questions. Anything this big is going to be pretty complex.
December 14th, 2006 at 12:53 am
Kari,
If you want to validate your comment, please send me a message at justinpgardner (at) yahoo dot com.
Thanks.
December 14th, 2006 at 11:04 am
Is there something about healthcare that requires that it be a federal program? Insurance is already state based. Any state could pass this exact program and try it out. Many states already mandate that people have auto insurance, why is health insurance different?
I’d prefer 50 opportunities to hedge our national bets, rather than trust that Congress will impliment the right plan.
December 14th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Sounds a bit like shuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Can anyone provide a site that explains/shows the savings in Medicare?
December 14th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
The link that Kari provided has the details of the proposed bill, including the savings, in pdf format.
And Kari, just so there’s no confusion, my comment last night was just to make sure you’re legit. I read that today and I thought it may not make sense, so now we’re all on the same page.
December 14th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
Thanks, the Lewin Group deserves a hand. Without question, I believe in the projected savings based on administrative fees. The savings based on increase health insurance competition are a bit more speculative. Anyway, thanks for the link.
December 14th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
I have a friend who works in contracts for Blue Cross – and for a few years her job was to try to write their policy guidelines for each of the 50 states to make sure it was in compliance with all of the various different state laws. These companies probably waste more time and money due to the patchwork of differing laws than they would due to any presumed federal waste or inefficiency.
I personally fear more the likelihood that a national program will end up being a tax giveaway to insurance and drug companies than it will be a huge bloated waste of a program. Fortunately, that is less likely now with the Democrats in charge (assuming they can resist the evil siren song of K Street). Of course Bush will veto anything that doesn’t spread enough graft among his owners…
December 14th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
After reading the Senators web site, you’ll see it actually removes the tax breaks for employer health coverage because it removes them from the responsibility of paying for it. Businesses actually ‘cash out’ health plans and increase employee wages by that amount. That’s what’s so amazing. It’s not socialized ‘Health Welfare’. And the fact that Dos Peros didn’t chime that alarm is proof positive. There’s something for everyone here. Still, it’s a big ‘pie in the sky’.
It professes to create incentives for demanding lower costs because we have to pay the full costs of our healthcare – premiums and all. Estimates for a married couple wth dependants are $714/month, or $10,546/yr – ouch! But remember, this will be offset by the increased wages and ’subsidies provided under the plan’, whatever that means.
My skepticism evaporated as I read on because they answered so many questions that were stumbling blocks in the past.
So why not just take the xtra bucks to Vegas? Because premiums are paid through the tax collex system, on a sliding scale based on earnings.
Sounds to good to be true? As you say, we’ll see. Can’t wait to see who’ll hate it the most.