HealthCast

Comment: The conservative policy community has long advocated for an end to employer-sponsored coverage. They believe that insurance should be an individual choice while recognizing that government has to play some role in funding care for low-income individuals.What are we hearing from these voices in the progressive community? They agree that the regressive tax policies are highly inequitable and must be changed.

Andrew Stern goes even further and states that the deterioration in employer-sponsored coverage, declining enrollment, and the financial burden placed on employers leaves no real option other than to replace it with a better system.The progressives acknowledge that the policy issues are well understood. In fact, single payer would certainly accomplish our goals (though Furman conjectures on the well-documented and irrefutable efficiency of single payer).

So what do they say? Let's adopt any better system, except single payer.The policy issues are well understood. Simply changing tax policy (Furman) or adopting a universal, multi-payer system (Stern) perpetuate and expand some of the crucial policy flaws that we face today.Single payer won't fix all of the problems in our health care system, but it will fix all of the problems with the financing of health care. And isn't that what the debate is all about?
QOTD 6/22



Click the title link for transcript and video

6/16/2006
Employment-Based Health Insurance: A Prominent Past, But Does It Have A
Future?
Hosts: Brookings Institution and the New America Foundation

Andrew Stern, president, Service Employees International Union:

...this is not a matter of policy. If we could solve this health care system
by policy it would have been solved every single year. There's more good
policy about health care in America than I can imagine. It is the most
studied, researched, you know, we have commissions and committees publicly
and privately all throughout Washington and the United States. It's really
about politics and leadership.

Our choice is we could keep making incremental changes in the health care
system. And I certainly appreciate that everyone would like to build a
better funding stream for the health care system but the truth is we're way
past incremental change. It's not going to work.

...so the fundamental change for me means one, you have to recognize that
employer based health care is ending, it's dying in front of our very eyes. The
charts say it there. It will not rebound, I believe, in the next economic
upturn in America. It was a good friend. It served America well in the 20th
Century. We love it dearly. Employers, to their credit, lived with it for a
long time despite all of the distortions that it created. But it's
collapsing in front of our eyes. It may still be breathing but anybody who
can look into the future says, "This employer based health care system is
over in America."

I'm here to also say I don't think we need to import Canada or any other
system. We're going to build an American system because we're Americans and
we don't like anybody else's system.

I think the single payer issue is kind of a stalking horse for I'm not sure
what, because we're going to have a multi-payer system or some kind of
system, you know, that it's built into the cost of goods in America.