By Jack Lohman, for SBT
O
f all of our health care needs, government protection of insurance company mega-profits is not a needed reform. But that apparently won’t stop President George W. Bush, who has proposed an annual $7,500 single and $15,000 family tax credit for citizens who are either unemployed or whose employer has dumped their health insurance.
This would enable them to purchase directly to help insurance companies stay in the loop and retain their profits.
Bush has also made his usual plug for health savings accounts, for which Wall Street, the credit card industry and bankruptcy attorneys will forever be in his debt.
Tax credits are not the answer. We should be providing health care directly to the patient, not through employers or third-party insurance companies that drain resources.
Follow the money. These are taxpayer assets being given to the insurance industry for non-health care services – when instead, the insurance industry shouldn’t be getting a penny of our health care dollars. They consume 20 percent of all health care dollars yet provide absolutely zero health care benefits to the patient.
That’s a shameful waste. We need administration, not insurance companies. We should totally eliminate the unnecessary costs that are consumed by marketing, salesman commissions, underwriting costs, huge executive salaries and high corporate profits. None of these would exist under a single-payer system like Canada’s. With a strong political will, we could mimic Canada’s system and extend health care to 100 percent of the public, and we’d spend the same amount of dollars we are spending today to cover only 85 percent of the people. To boot, we can do it without Canada’s wait times!
The money saved would be spent on more doctors and more nurses to serve more patients.
The state must implement a universal health care system, and the proposal by Sen. Mark Miller (D-Monona) and Rep. Chuck Benedict (D-Beloit) provides the mechanism to bring health care to all residents by July 1, 2008. The logical approach would be to contract with an administrative service, like Medicare does with WPS in Madison, and today’s insurance companies would be candidates to serve the state in that capacity.
There are other health care proposals, but none are as extensive and none are as simple. With added complexity comes costly administration, the very thing we must eliminate if we are to afford the system. With single-payer, the patient receives services and the administrator writes the check. It’s that simple.
We’d incorporate BadgerCare and Medicaid patients, and we’d cut worker compensation and auto insurance rates in half because the medical portions of those are handled by the universal system. And we’d not be hampered by federal laws that prohibit negotiating for lower drug prices, so our single-risk pool would enable us to maximize the economies of scale.
The Miller-Benedict proposal is not just the best system for the public, it is also the most business-friendly proposal on the table. It will attract more companies and more jobs to the state than the others, and fewer businesses and jobs will be lost. Initially, it would be funded by a payroll tax and the transfer of funds from the other systems it replaces.
What’s not to like about that?
Jack Lohman is a retired business owner from Colgate and author of “Politicians – Owned and Operated by Corporate America.” He also is the founder of www.ThrowTheRascalsOut.org. He can be reached at jlohman@execpc.com.
