The Washingtonian’s View

Some people think America’s $2.2 trillion-a-year medical complex is enormously wasteful, ill-targeted, inefficient and unfair. The best medical care is extremely good, but the Rube Goldberg system through which that care is financed is considered extremely bad – and falling apart. 1 out of 3 non-elderly Americans spend some time without health insurance every two years, and a majority of them remain uninsured for more than 9 months.

Although healthcare inflation seemed to have slowed somewhat, annual increases still slightly exceed the overall rate of inflation. Employees continue to view the cost of healthcare coverage as the primary factour driving their healthcare benefit stratagey.

Runaway health costs have become an increasingly great threat, not just to security of family finances, but also to corporate America’s bottom line. The United States spends much more as a share of its economy on healthcare than any other nation, and yet all this spending has failed to buy Americans the one thing that health insurance is suppose to provide: health security.

Healthcare insecurity is not just confined to one part of the population. It is experienced by all Americans – those without insurance as well as those who risk losing coverage; those who are impoverished as well as those with higher incomes who experience catastrophic costs; those who are sick and injured as well as those who are one sickness or injury away from financial calamity. As healthcare costs have skyrocketed and the proportion of Americans with stable benefits have eroded, health insecurity has become a shared American experience, felt by those who thought they had made it as well as those just struggling to get by.

The Economy Policy Institute (EPI), located in downtown Washington, D.C., is looking to help establish a new contract in reference to healthcare and coverage. The EPI looks to use the most promising route forward in building on the most popular elements of the present structure – Medicare and employment – based health insurance for well-compensated workers – through a series of large-scale changes that are straightforward, politically doable, self-reinforcing, and guaranteed to provide expanded health security. This is called Health Care for America.

Health Care for America would expand insurance to all non-elderly Americans through a new Medicare-like program and workplace health insurance.  At the same time, it is suppose to create an effective framework for controlling medical costs and improving health outcomes to guarantee affordable quality care for all. 

Every legal resident of the United States who lacks access to Medicare or good workplace coverage would be able to buy into the “Health Care for America Plan.”  This pool is supposed to be modeled after Medicare.  It would team up with Medicare to bargain for lower prices and upgrade the quality of care so every enrollee would have access to either an affordable Medicare-like plan with free choice of providers. 

At the same time, employers would be asked to either provide coverage as good as this new plan or, failing that, makes a relatively modest payroll-based contribution to the Health Care for America Plan to help finance coverage for their workers.

Republicans and moderate conservatives support the plan since it would bring people off Medicare and help them take responsibility for their own health care needs.  Democrats have issue with it because it is yet again another plan where hard working men and women have to add another expenditure into their already increased monthly budget.  Whatever the case, it is certain that the present Congress will not have anything better through this session.