Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise

Big news in health care today, as a new super coalition is going to try to tackle America's insurance mess. The new group, vapidly titled Better Health Care Together, brings together unlikely partners such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Center for American Progress, Wal*Mart, and AT&T. The idea is to promote these four bland and content-free action items:

1) We believe each person in America must be guaranteed access to quality, affordable health insurance coverage;

2) We believe individuals have a responsibility to maintain and protect their health;

3) We believe that America must dramatically improve the value it receives for every health care dollar; and

4) We believe that businesses, governments, and individuals all should contribute to managing and financing a new American health care system.

The interesting part of this news is obviously not the action items but rather the coalition itself. Previous efforts at health care reform have been stymied by business interests, led especially by health insurance companies. Somehow the insurance industry got it in its head that eliminating private health insurance would be bad for their business model, and they will do everything they can to stop the most effective reform: eliminating private health insurance, just like every other advanced country:

Every other advanced nation in the world has a national health care system for all. Try asking a crowd of people if they know anyone in Europe who doesn't have health care coverage. Or in Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Malta, Costa Rica, Cuba or dozens of other countries in the world..

It's not an easy thing to do when you want to eliminate an entire sector of your economy for the health, as it were, of the rest of the economy. But it will be easier if big corporations that have previously sided with health insurers throw their weight behind fixing the problem. Not just because they are the largest consumers of health insurance and will be listened to, but also because you have to have corporate money talking if you want any Republicans to listen.

The good news is that for the last couple of years, big business has started to realize how much it's getting screwed by the current employer-provided system. Notably, GM announced that health care expenses were adding thousands of dollars per vehicle in extra costs to their bottom line. GM reasoned that this was forcing them to be less competitive on the global marketplace, since their competitors have operations in countries with sensible health care systems. Now, this is pretty much BS, since GM's lack of competitiveness is more easily traced to their willingness to let Honda and Toyota make much better cars with much better gas mileage. But overpaying for health care isn't doing big powerful corporations any favors, and the point is that they now realize it.

So perhaps we have reach an impasse. Big corporations want to stop paying for health insurance, and health insurance companies want people to keep buying it. It would take a real visionary, decider, uniter of a politician to craft the delicate solution that could fix this problem. Fortunately, George W. Bush is still in office, and the health care plan he announced at the State of the Union Address addresses every corporation's worry. It changes tax incentives to make it more economical for people to buy their own private insurance and less economical for them to get it through their employer. But by sticking with private insurance, the HMOs get to keep making a profit off denying people medical treatment This is not an adequate solution, and fortunately it doesn't look like the Democratic Congress is going to jump up and help Bush make it work.

That's the real beauty of this coalition. It isolates the health insurance companies from their erstwhile allies in big business, and it lends legitimacy to the only actual solution. By combining the forces of the Wise (people who want to see effective, efficient coverage for everyone) with the Wealthy (those who want to see costs become reasonable), we can only end up with the one rational solution for making everyone in America more Healthy: single payer care.