NBC’s First Read had a nice little take on the politics of reforming health care:
So let’s get this straight: Barack Obama won last year’s presidential election by seven percentage points (53%-46%) campaigning, in part, for some form of universal health care; his party is about to have 60 votes in the Senate; polls show the country is receptive to overhauling health care; and the president’s approval rating is between 56-60%. But Senate Democrats, like Dianne Feinstein, now say that Obama might not have the votes to pass health care? “I think there’s a lot of concern in the Democratic caucus,” she said on Sunday, per the AP.
It is truly head scratching. Here’s what I don’t get and have never gotten: why isn’t the business community fully behind health care reform, forcing their lobbyists to make it happen? B-school profs and management talking heads get paid a lot of money preach about core competencies — the idea that a company should figure out what it does better than anyone else and do it. How administering a health care plan and paying people to oversee it is part of that core competency is beyond me. Wouldn’t every company be better off if they could shift this burden to some third party (whether the federal government or a co-op or whoever)? If companies for some reason still wanted to be in the health care game, they could offer discounts or supplemental programs—vision plans, specialists on call, etc. —to distinguish themselves from rivals or just to keep employees healthy and happy.
And it’s not just big companies that would benefit. Making health insurance universal and affordable surely would cause a huge wave of small businesses to start ups. I’m convinced that people would leave corporate jobs in droves if they knew that they weren’t one broken arm away from debtor’s prison. For all of our talk about how fluid the economy is, the lack of health care options for those outside the big company umbrella has to be a major source of friction.
I was recently talking with a venture capitalist in Toronto (who does cross border investing) and asked him if he had ever looked at how having universal health effected entrepreneurs. Here’s what he said:
It is very hard to decouple the two variables i.e. x rate of start-ups – y universal health-care (or not) from the many variables that influence someone’s decision to join/start a start-up. […] From my experience it does make is simpler for people to make that choice. In the US, an entrepreneur could be taking his/her life or that of their loved one in their hands if they forsake medical coverage to do a start-up. In Canada, there are other issues to consider, but that is not one of them.
All of this is why it drives me crazy to read the obsessive reports on the cost of reforming health care, as if there’s only one side to the ledger. From
Bloomberg:
Senators from both parties are wary of health-care overhaul because of the $1.6 trillion cost estimate, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said on ABC’s “This Week” program today. The budget office calculation “was a death blow to government-run health care plan,” he said.
I’d like to know what would happen to the economy if we
did get some reform passed. My hunch is that it would be less of a death blow and more of a, I don’t know, stimulus.
