John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc., wrote an excellent op-ed about health care reform for the Wall Street Journal. Unlike the often over-the-top bile health care reform has attracted from conservatives, Mackey doesn’t just criticize universal health care (though it looks like the actual bill will fall far short of the universal health care half our country is terrified of), he offers 8 alternative ways to reform our system. I’m fully on board with six of them.

• Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs).

I’m not sure what legal obstacles there are, but by all means remove them. For myself I’d much prefer a high-deductible health insurance plan and an HSA over other options. The health care plan Whole Foods offers their employees sounds absolutely perfect.

Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.

This I’m also 100% behind. My employer doesn’t provide health insurance for me, if anything I’d like to get some myself (I don’t have any currently). Why should I be punished for getting an individual plan?

Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.

Makes perfect sense to me. If the best deal is in California or Tennessee, then why can’t I buy insurance from there?

Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.

I’m somewhat torn on this one. He makes a good point that costs go up when insurance companies are forced to cover more expensive illnesses and treatments, but I’m sure those illnesses wouldn’t make any insurance company money and most would drop them if given the option. What happens to those people with those specific illnesses? I suppose if you were able to buy insurance from companies in any state that one would think at least someone would provide coverage for x, y or z treatment. But would it then be too expensive for anyone to afford? Even if such a move would make health care cheaper for 80, 90 or 99% of the population what about those left over? I guess, ironically, the best option if this reform happened would be for the government to cover those left out.

Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.

This has also been a big conservative talking point about health care reform. I’m not terribly sure. If the hospital removes the wrong leg and I end up without any legs because of someone’s mistake, you better believe I’d want to sue and would be justified in getting every last nickle out of the bastards. Capping damages or anything else would no doubt reduce health care costs, but by circumventing our legal system it seems it would hurt victims of medical malpractice.

Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor’s visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?

I think this is a huge and valuable point. The markets works best when there are informed consumers, but no one really seems to know or care how much their treatment costs. At least not as much as they should. So people don’t make the best decisions, and will opt for expensive, sometimes unnecessary treatment because, what the hell, the insurance takes care of it. They don’t even need to think about what it costs if they aren’t getting the bill. At the grocery store people will pick the can of beans that is 20 cents cheaper but go in for thousands of dollars of medical testing without giving it much thought. People need to apply some frugality to medical care, it’d drive down the price for everyone and those people who really need that expensive treatment or testing would probably find it cheaper.

Enact Medicare reform. We need to face up to the actuarial fact that Medicare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility.

Not a point with many specifics, but sure, we need to reform Medicare.

Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

I don’t see how anyone could object to this one. Lets do it.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.