Via twitter friend Strawbrry_Blonde-an excellent refutation of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey. SB's comments are in italics.
read the original op-ed by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey here.
•Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees' Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.
Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan's costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.
This is precisely what people need-an incentive to spend their health care dollars more carefully! Normally I would just blow my allowance on trendy procedures and impulse purchases to impress all my friends, but if I had to spend a couple grand before I could get any benefits at all, boy howdy would I be more careful!
•Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.
Employer-provided health care is group coverage, and thus is subject to an enormous amount of regulation that doesn't apply to individual policies (most notably the stipulation that ALL members of the group must be offered coverage). Given this additional burden, it's only reasonable that employer-provided plans should enjoy a tax exemption. If individual plans were to commit to covering patients with pre-existing conditions, they should receive this exemption as well.
•Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.
In fact such a provision would strike a fatal blow to states' rights to make their own laws regarding health care. If the people of Massachusetts, for example, want to enact a different health care system than the one that exists in Oklahoma, they currently have the option of doing that through a democratic process. If insurance companies were able to compete across state lines, the result would be an immediate rush to the cheapest state by insurance companies and in short order the elimination of all other options. The huge majority of financial companies in the US aren't based in Delaware because Americans have a keen interest in Delawarean financial products. It's because that's where the tax rate is the lowest, so it makes bad business sense to do business anywhere else.
•Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.
This point perpetuates the fantasy that health insurance plans are just another consumer product, like a pair of shoes, or a computer or a car. But in a very real way, they're not. If, for example, demand for manual-transmission cars drops to the point where it's no longer profitable to produce them, then companies will stop, and the minority of folks who prefer manual transmissions will simply have to cope with having an automatic transmission. That's how free markets work. Conversely, if insurance industry executives make the very reasonable business decision that it's not profitable to cover the cost of treatment for Addison's disease, people will die. Let me say that again: People. Will. Die.
•Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.
Tort reform has not led to health care cost savings for consumers. If anything, it has led to unnecessary restrictions on civil rights for citizens with no appreciable result in lowering the cost of malpractice suits. But don't take it from me-take it from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
•Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor's visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?
Great, so now I have an itemized bill for the treatment of my daughter's life-threatening bout of meningitis. I'm still going to go into bankruptcy paying it.
•Enact Medicare reform. We need to face up to the actuarial fact that Medicare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility.
OMG if I'd realized that it were as simple as just "reforming Medicare," then this would all be done by now! At this rate, we can probably just completely eradicate poverty by the end of the summer!
•Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
