How a single-payer health care system can drive innovation into the economy

A SINGLE-PAYER SYSTEM COULD DRIVE INNOVATION INTO THE NEW ECONOMY

I’ve been an HR professional for the past 20 years.  I have fought with insurance companies through most of that time.  More recently I’ve seen the impact on people who have lost their jobs and for the first time are really having to face the outrageous cost of health insurance for the first time.  I think there is a willingness and understanding of the benefits of a single payer system in the US for the first time.

Many of us would very much like to give up the corporate life and start our own, new businesses, creating tomorrows jobs.  We know a change in how we work and what we do is coming and we want to be at the forefront of it.

However, the difficulty in keeping ourselves and our families protected from health care costs will inevitably drive many great people back into corporations where their great ideas will die a slow death.  

The naysayers to national health care threaten that we will have no “choices”. But I believe that being forced to live the company life is not a choice that many who have been knocked out of their old jobs want to make.

From a fiscal point of view, a mixed system will ultimately create an adverse burden on any national health care system.  People who can get company sponsored health care will certainly choose it.  The public option will be filled with people who are underemployed, or can’t on their own afford low deductible plans with co-pays, and so continue to use the emergency room as the family doctor.  Older people, who will have a harder time finding work again will need the national plan.  

At the end of the day, the cost of the government to insure these people but not others will make price-tag go way up for the government plan.  There isn’t an insurance company it the world who would allow you to put together a population like this and take your business.  

But the right thing to do is not the same as the most politically expedient thing to do, and I don’t believe that congress is ready to give up that campaign funding in order to do the right thing.  Sort of heart breaking really.

Eve Luppert is the Smarty-Pants, Brainiac of 3Peas Consulting