fat mogul

Handyman League topic # 2, Health Care Reform.  This one’s been huge lately, maybe becoming even more of a talking-head buzz topic than the economy lately, and just under S.C. Governor Sanford.  This topic’s a fairly dear one to me as well, because although I may be very unhappy with the status of health insurance options in the nation today, I get my money from that same industry, and, well, I’d like to keep my house, for right now anyways.

So, unfortunately, this puts me in one of those situations that many of our politicians today seem to be in, which is, I have a conflict of interest.  That doesn’t mean that i don’t have buckets of opinions on the subject.  In fact, knowing how things work from the inside shows me how much more we DO need health care reform.  And, I think we’re starting to think along the right track. 

First topic of discussion, socialized health care.  Nope.  I’m not for it, and here’s the simple reason why, even beyond the fact that it would be the start of putting me out of a job (maybe).   I already have issues with the speed involved in my health care options.  In fact, I went to the Urgent Care office a few weeks ago, having a delayed reaction to my immunotherapy shots, and was told that it would be an hour before anyone could see me.  Now, I personally wasn’t afraid of anaphylactic shock, but. . .well, they should have been (and, I suppose, I probably should have been too).  Luckily a doctor received word of my condition and they pushed me forward in the list.   

I don’t want to bring up a overused analogy, but I can’t help but think about my previous customer service experience with government ran facilities in that I go to one window, wait for way too long just to talk to someone, only to be told that I’m at the wrong window, get to the correct window only to determine that I either filled out the wrong form, or didn’t fill one out at all.  And that, I would fear, could be merely the registration process.  Then you would look at the fact that the government would be reimbursing medical facilities at the bare minimum possible, which means that the doctors would be run even more thin as hospitals and private practitioners would be slashing their budgets for additional help as much as possible.  Looking at the way that CMS currently requires insurance companies to reimburse for Medicare enrollees is a great example of how our medical facilities would be looking to cut corners elsewhere.  I could probably come up with a couple of other reasons for you as well, if you wanted, to go against a fully government regulated social health care system, but, the point’s not to destroy ideas, but to come up with fixes.

So, I do believe that we need something in place to ensure that everyone has health coverage.  Current research estimates that 17% of our nation’s population has limited or even no access to health care.  That’s a lot of people out there, more than likely in the lower class sector of our economy, living without the right to be healthy.   Yet, most states have Medicaid programs in place to assist low income individuals and families, so, I don’t see why we wouldn’t be able to mimic that on a federal level.  Most of the money for our current Medicaid systems comes from federal funding anyways, so why couldn’t we set up some sort of research agenda to develop the best of all of the current products out there to give our population a better chance. 

But that’s still not going to fix the issue, as we’ve got so many people who are above the poverty line, who are fully employed and/or employable, not disabled, and overall not able to get insurance through Medicare or Medicaid.  These people come from all works of life now that more and more employers are discontinuing their health insurance benefits.  How do we help these people? 

Here’s my top 5:

1.  Above everything, we need better standardization of health insurance companies.  Although I don’t believe that the government should be running our nation’s health insurance, I do believe that there should be better regulation of the products offered in correlation to the premiums charged.  And, perhaps, an extension of the idea of a “public plan” which is currently being bantied about, that would still be ran by private parties, but would be subsidised by the government (very similar to our current Medicare/Medicaid systems) and made to meet strict regulatory rules.  If we allow this competition to happen in the marketplace, I believe that we would have a better chance of having products created that would actually appeal and help the market, as opposed to what currently seems to exist.

2.  Plain language laws.  I know that there has been some recent movement in Washington regarding credit card companies being required to use a more vernacular style of writing when selling to potential customers.  I think this could be even more important when dealing with insurance companies.  There’s so much fine print hiding everywhere between all of these companies, that many people don’t see the real differences between their options.  I constantly worried about the fact that a company with an approximate 90% disapproval rating is one of the (if the THE) best selling insurances around the States.  This doesn’t make sense to me.  Make the insurers make their intentions known so that the customers know what they are getting into.

3.  More subsidies.  I really like the idea of subsidies.  But, then again, I’m a big fan of the idea of positive reinforcement.  And I believe that we can get businesses to do what we want with a little bit of reward.  So, I say we offer some sort of tax subsidy to businesses that offer health insurance benefits to their employees.  Something that will defray the cost of offering this benefit, while also giving the opportunity to increase employee morale, should be something every business owner would jump at. 

4.  But I think in this scenario there needs to be another side to the coin.  For companies that employ over so many people (as in, if you’ve got so few people that you can’t get a break in the insurance world for your business) who don’t offer health insurance benefits, increase those taxes.  Call it a health endangerment tax if you need to, but no matter what, make sure companies know that our nation is really serious about offering health benefits to our population.

5.  Better auditing practices of our current insurance subsidies.  If we’re offering money to companies to run our nation’s insurance options, i.e. the many companies that sell Medicare Advantage Plans, we need to verify much better than we currently are that they are following our federal and state regulations much better than I believe is currently being done.  Having family members who deal with billing to Medicare on a frequent basis, I’m well aware of the fact that the status quo of hiring in our private sector claims processing facilities is currently set with a very low bar of standards.  This can NOT stand. 

Just another couple of poorly informed thoughts to take on with you.  Feel free to add your own, completely disagree, or ignore as you wish.  But, more importantly, think about the way the issues in our nation can be fixed, instead of just complaining about them.  In case you haven’t watched the news lately, you can see that our nation is really looking for any feasible option to make these things work.

Handymen HO!

1. Michael says:

   June 26, 2009 at 11:16 am

   Hey, have you seen this news article?
   New details about Michael Jackson’s Death Emerge
   I was wondering if you were going to blog about this…