Re: Papa Johns' CEO: Obamacare will increase our costs, reduce employee hours
I haven't seen that reasoning discussed. I think single payer, extending Medicare, would be a better plan than the ACA
So long as we are willing to accept a poorer future in which our elderly lack access to healthcare, yes. There is a reason that every single-payer program comes along with a bureaucracy whose job it is to decide when people are no longer cost-effective.
Our employers should not be burdened with carrying insurance for us.
Medicare is currently slated to go bankrupt in 12 years. How in the world is adding hundreds of millions of people to its' rolls likely to improve that?
I'm sorry your insurance sucks, but that is not the case for Medicare nor the insurance the congress and I think most other federal employees receive. It can be done better, that is for sure.
Again, Medicare is about to go bankrupt, and take Social Security and the rest of the Federal government with it. It is not a model we want to build on.
How, could insurance companies offer affordable individual polices?
I'm glad you asked.
The short answer is - the same way that the automobile insurance companies do. Think about it - your car insurance doesn't pay for you to fill up your gas tank. It doesn't pay for your oil changes. If it
did pay for these things - would you really care what the price of gas was? Would you get the economy gas when you could get the "Chevron Silver" for 10 cents more and (according to the cartoon on the pump) help clean your engine? You would, and you wouldn't care about the cost, because you aren't paying for it. But auto insurance doesn't operate like that - it's insurance. It pays for when something unexpected and/or catastrophic happens - when you get into an accident. That's what insurance
is, that's how it is supposed to function. But for some reason we expect our health insurance to pay for the equivalent of tanks of gas and oil changes. And so people don't care how much the extra shot costs, they don't really care if the test is redundant, and sure, supersize my hospital room as much as my insurance company will pay for.
We don't allow people to make
price conscious decisions with healthcare, and that is why health insurance is so expensive. Because
none of us make price conscious decisions,
all of us cost more, and so the price of insuring us rises.
High-deductible, catastrophic care health insurance is A) affordable and B) actually
insurance. It has the additional virtue of causing people to make
most medical decisions (which are neither catastrophic nor emergency) in a price-conscious manner, while at the same time making sure that if little johnny get's a broken arm, or your spouse get's cancer, that you are covered. When paired with Health Savings Accounts, which allow you to pay for regular maintenance-style healthcare with pre-tax dollars, the system can work very well indeed.
These aren't individual experience (except for the last one), but when we look at the reform efforts that have sought to put price-consciousness back into play, we see that they have been very successful:
Indiana offered HSA's, which have patients save money in tax-free accounts (where it grows and remains theirs forever and ever unless theys pend it) matched with high deductible plans to it's employees. Employees began to respond to price signals, and medical costs per patient were reduced by 33% and expenditures to the state were reduced by 11%.
Safeway has instituted a program that gave financial incentives to people who engaged in healthy behavior by allowing price signals in the
insurance side of the market to work (Indiana worked on the medical side), and saw it's per-captia health care costs remain flat from 2005-2009; when most companies saw theirs jump by 38%.
Whole Foods instituted HSA's, and let's the employees choose what they want the company to fund. This institutes price pressure on the medical side (WF covers the high-deductible plan 100%), and their CEO points out that as a result Whole Foods' per-capita costs are much lower than typical insurance programs, while maintaining employee satisfaction.
Medicare Part D utilized price pressure on the insurance side, and saw expenditures come in at 40%
UNDER the original estimates - the only such government program in history to do so.
Wendy's instituted HSA's, and saw the number of their employees who got preventative and annual checkup care climb even as they saw claims decrease by 14% (in one year).
Wal-Mart's low cost clinics and prescriptions save us oodles of cash. Wal-Mart reports that "half of their clinic patients report that they are uninsured" and that "if it were not for [Wal-Marts'] clinics they would haven't gotten care - or they would have gone to an emergency room". Walmart - reducing costs
and expenditures.
Dr Robert Berry runs a practice called PATMOS (payment at time of service). he doesn't take insurance at all - but simply posts the prices of his services. By removing the cost of dealing with mutliple insurance agencies, medicare, and medicaid, the prices he is able to list are one half to
ONE THIRD of standard.