“The United States spends more money for health care than any other country in the world,” said Jennings in his introductory remarks, “yet it has a worse outcome than any other industrialized democracy.”
“Someone must speak for those whose voices have been drowned out,” he said. “Someone must speak for those who have jobs but lack health insurance. Someone must speak for those whose families have been destroyed by unimaginable health costs. Someone must speak for those whose pre-existing condition precludes them from coverage.”
Berry Friesen of the Pa. Health Access Network said that House Bill 3200 is good for small businesses.
“We need to get the message out,” Friesen said.
When a person gets a job that doesn’t offer health care, that employee is soon looking for another job that does.
The resulting recruitment and retention problem is killing small businesses, according to Friesen.
“The bill brings everybody into the system,” he said. “When everybody is covered, cherry picking stops.”
Cherry picking refers to the practice by health care insurers of tending to only give the best rates to people who don’t need health care or to the very healthiest in the population.
Full health insurance coverage for employees by employers won’t be without pain, according to Friesen. But when they do provide it he said, “We can start controlling costs. Most employers I know want to provide health care.”
Speaker Marc Stier with the advocacy group Health Care for America Now was more critical of the recently announced opposition by the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce (GLVCC) to HR 3200, or as opposition groups refer to it “Obama’s health plan or the Democrat’s health plan.”
“It is shocking that any organization representing small business would oppose this legislation,” Stier said. “For the first time, small businesses will be able to afford health care coverage for their employees.” He said the ability for small business to be in the insurance pool with millions of members is the key to lower health care costs.
“In the insurance business, the goal is to spread the risk over as many people as possible,” Stier explained. “The 14,500 small businesses in the Lehigh Valley will benefit.”
GLVCC responds
Tony Iannelli, president and CEO of the GLVCC, in an interview with the Press said that his organization is representing its members. He clarified his group’s position on health care reform.
“This is not about being against health care reform,” Iannelli said. “Health care does need to be reformed. The president and Congress can tweak the legislation to the point that we could support it. At this point, we believe it would be very expensive for business. We don’t want to see this expense born on the backs of business.”
Iannelli said that he does want to see tort reform included in the health care reform legislation.
What others say
While business groups in general may not agree with portions of the pending legislation, a review by the Press of information released by some leading business organizations and insurance trade organizations shows a wide agreement on the need to improve the expensive and underperforming health care system.
The Business Roundtable, a group of chief executive officers of large U.S. companies, released a study showing that U.S. workers and employers get 23 percent less value from their health-care spending than their counterparts in Japan, Germany, France, Canada or Britain. The study showed that they get 46 percent less value than in Brazil, China or India.
Catherine Arnst writing in BusinessWeek.com said that the Business Roundtable wants to maintain the current employer-based insurance system because it believes that providing health care is a valuable recruitment benefit.
James A. Klein, president of the American Benefits Council, a trade association for employer-based benefit plans, testified June 23 before the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor that the United States spent approximately $2.4 trillion on health care in 2007.
“This amount is almost twice as much as we spent in 1996, and total national health care spending is projected to double yet again by 2017. That level of increase is not sustainable. We already spend far more per capita on health care than any other developed nation, yet we rank well below other countries on many vital indicators of health status. However, perhaps even more troubling is the well-documented evidence that patients receive appropriate care for their conditions only about 55 percent of the time, and medical errors may account for as many as 98,000 fatalities each year.”
However, Klein, who also wants to retain an employer-based insurance system, said that data indicate that the “160 million Americans who receive health care coverage through the employment setting are exceedingly happy with the coverage.”
