About my blog
What I enjoy most about publishing Business District is the fact that I get to meet a lot of interesting people whom are active in the local business community. I get to hear about a lot of interesting initiatives that deserve media attention.
Many people ask me where we get our content from, and the simple answer is that we get it by paying attention when talking to these people. I also get it from interesting speakers that I hear, and I've trained enough people to consistently pitch ideas (but we can always use more!).
The purpose of my blog is to chronicle the events that happen during the course of building our publication and its community. I will address issues that I believe are pertinent to your business, showcase innovative business models, and help you gain greater exposure through advertising and public relations. |
Jason Myers - Publisher's Blog Comments on Marc Katz's article on championing universal health coverage In the March 2008 issue of Business District, Marc Katz calls for US Businesses to champion universal health coverage.
Since I tend to fall to the right politically, I cringe at calling for universal anything that is government controlled. But those that are for less government involvement should take the time to understand that Katz is not referring to a single payor system or to government-run healthcare.
His article makes the point the burden is unfairly placed on businesses in this country, and it shouldn't be.
Dr. Ken Shine, author of the 2006 Code Red report, explains how we got into this situation in our Dec 2006 issue's executive roundtable. He said, "We got into this situation by accident. After World War II, there were wage and price controls. As a consequence of that, many large companies decided that the way to compete for workers was to offer health benefits. As a result, the U.S. is one of only two countries in the world that connect health care with employment—and that’s the fundamental flaw.
"We did not take on health insurance as a national requirement. We did move toward the deserving elderly with Medicare, because they were no longer employed. Medicaid was added to it on the grounds that there was a certain amount of other people that also wouldn’t be employed.
"Any ultimate solution has to involve universal coverage of some kind. Not necessarily a single payor, and not necessarily nationalization.
"So how do we provide the coverage? There have been a myriad of proposals including everything from expanding Medicare to cover the entire population to expanding things like the federal employees health system to the entire population.
"The dilemma with those is that those people vote. They don’t want to see their plan which is working very well threaten to jeopardize by applying it broadly.
"Massachusetts is doing it incrementally. What they did was make eligibility for state sponsored health care coverage substantially higher –200-300 percent of the federal poverty level. So they cover large numbers of people, and as a result, their uninsured rate is in the single digits.
"So we got into it by accident, and we are only going to get out of it at a point at which some combination of businesses and government leadership decides that there needs to be fundamental switch from employer-based insurance to something that is much broader," Shine concluded.
Katz's article is exactly along this line by calling for businesses to champion universal health coverage, and I agree.
This doesn't mean we need to look to the government to solve our healthcare crisis. We need innovative solutions that come from every angle regionally, state-wide, and nationally. Just like the proposed plan from the Hospital district outlined in this issue's "Answering the Call."
Market forces will drive reform when the pain gets bad enough (just look at what's happening in clean tech and alternative energy with rising gas prices) and Katz is saying we need to band together as businesses and declare our pain. | | | |
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