Sunday, April 01, 2007

CEOs for Socialism Now!

Not exactly... but according to Jonathan Cohn in the New York Times Magazine, support for universal health insurance is growing among business leaders:
For many years, the only business leaders openly calling for universal coverage were mavericks like Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks, who has long preached the need for business to show greater social responsibility. The C.E.O.’s rallying to universal coverage now — particularly in the last few months — are acting not so much out of social solidarity as out of financial necessity, as the burden of financing workers’ premiums has become ever more onerous.

“The refrain from business was, ‘We can’t afford to do universal health care,’ ” says [Senator Ron] Wyden, whose plan calls for shifting responsibility for buying insurance from employers to individuals. “Now the refrain is, ‘We can’t afford not to do it.’ ” The Business Roundtable, one of Washington’s most influential business lobbies, now endorses universal coverage, at least in broad principle. And probably no spectacle captured the spirit of the times more than a joint conference held in February by [service employees union leader] Andy Stern and a man he has spent much of the last few years attacking, Lee Scott, the C.E.O. of Wal-Mart. Together the two pronounced the need for universal coverage by 2012.
Cohn's article provides some useful historical background. He reminds us there was initially significant business support for President Clinton's plan in 1993:
Though it is not widely remembered, Clinton tried hard to curry favor with business. Ira Magaziner, the chief architect of the administration’s plan, met repeatedly with corporate leaders to seek their advice, understand their needs and anxieties and test their tolerance for various provisions. Although the final White House plan included an “employer mandate” — meaning all businesses would be required to pay for a portion of their employees’ health-care costs — Clinton constructed that mandate so that many employers would actually benefit... why didn’t business support the Clinton health plan?

Actually, there was some support — at least initially. Most notably, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at first embraced the concept of an employer mandate. But when the chamber, which represents both big and small companies, announced its endorsement, it came under attack from the National Federation of Independent Businesses, which represents only small firms. The chamber quickly started to lose members — and to field irate calls from Republican legislators warning against giving any support to the Clinton plan. The chamber and other allies backed off.

Many of the current generation of univeral health care plans are more the liking of business because they place the responsibility for obtaining insurance on individuals rather then business. The plan offered by Senator Wyden, for example:

Wyden is quick to share credit for the plan with [Safeway supermarkets CEO Steve] Burd, particularly when it comes to what is arguably its most significant provision: the severance of the longstanding relationship between where you work and how you’re insured. Under the Wyden proposal, most Americans would still use private insurance. But they would not get that coverage through employers anymore. Instead, all employers that offer insurance would “cash out” their benefits — in effect, giving their employees higher wages rather than health benefits. Once that was done, people would be required to buy coverage on their own, directly from insurers.
Some would say that by going elaborate lengths that to use "private" rather than "goverment" (socialism, gasp!) insurance, this plan - like President Clinton's - will not lead to the most cost-effective outcome:
Of course, some experts would argue that, strictly on the merits, a single-payer system might actually work better. Unlike plans like Wyden’s that rely on private insurers, a single-payer plan substantially reduces the amount of money spent on administration, since insurance companies spend far more on overhead (and marketing, and profits) than public systems. And while the data on medical outcomes are notoriously uneven and hard to interpret, they don’t show that the United States provides uniformly better care than single-payer nations like Canada or France. In fact, on measures like “Disability Adjusted Life Expectancy,” which social scientists use to measure the performance of national health-care arrangements, single-payer systems actually seem to perform slightly better on the whole.
One political lesson Senator Wyden, the business backers of his plan, and others should learn from 1993 is that even if you make a point of relying on the private sector, you'll inevitably be labelled a "socialist" anyway.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home