Private Health Care Reform is Getting Started!

 

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article, “More Employers Overhaul Health Benefits”, which describes a movement just getting started whereby employers give their employees a fixed sum of money and let them choose their own plan from an online market place.  The idea is that employers will be better able to predict and control their healthcare expenses for employees.  Furthermore, employees will be able to get better value for dollars spent by selecting their own coverage options, deductible amounts, copays, etc.
In fact, in an exchange run by Liazon Corp., which has 60,000 people enrolled, 75% of workers have chosen less expensive plans than they had before, by accepting bigger deductibles and copays, as well as smaller choices of healthcare providers and restrictions such as primary-care gatekeepers.
This is such an appealing approach to private healthcare cost control that the Accenture Management Consulting Company estimates just five years from now there will be 40,000,000 business employees receiving their healthcare benefits in this manner.  This would be a phenomenal development!
The United States spends 18% of GDP on healthcare altogether, both public and private, which is double the amount spent by any other country.  This enormous expense is a major reason why wage growth is stagnant in our country as well as why the costs of public programs like Medicare and Medicaid are so high and contributing to so much government debt.  It is critical for our country to get the rapid increase of healthcare costs under much better control.  That’s why this new movement of employers and employees working together on this critical problem is such a big step in the right direction.
If the estimate by Accenture is anywhere nearly accurate about how fast this new private healthcare selection method will grow, then there will soon be an excellent opportunity for Congress to expand its benefits to the control of Medicare and Medicaid costs as well.  This is very exciting indeed!

Should the Federal Government Bail Out Detroit?

 

The former Obama administration auto czar, Steven Rattner, wrote in yesterday’s New York Times that “We Have to Step in And Save Detroit” from bankruptcy.  Detroit has $18 billion in liabilities, half of which are for municipal employee pension plans and retiree health benefits.  Mr. Rattner says that “It isn’t fair to cut pensions.  The workers didn’t cause this mess.”
Many state and local governments are indeed in terrible financial condition because of the cost of public employee pensions.  There have already been several municipal bankruptcies around the country and there will be many more.  The state of Illinois is in particularly bad financial shape, for the same reasons as Detroit, and will almost certainly have to declare bankruptcy in the near future.
The basic problem is that state and municipal governments often have so-called “defined benefit” pension plans for their employees rather than the “defined contribution”, or 401(k), retirement plans used by private business.  Defined benefit plans guarantee a certain level of pension payment, based on the employee’s salary, regardless of the investment returns of the contributions to the fund.  Defined contribution plans, on the contrary, only pay out in benefits what has actually been accumulated in investment earnings.  For a defined benefit plan the employer (i.e. the government and therefore the taxpayers) is at risk for any shortfall in funding.  For a defined contribution plan, the individual employee is at risk for underperforming investment of the fund.  The only viable solution to this massive problem is for state and local government to shift as rapidly as possible from defined benefit to defined contribution retirement plans.
For the federal government to jump in and bail out one particular struggling municipality would create a moral hazard.  Every other state and local government with the same problem, numbering in the hundreds or thousands, would want equal treatment.  The federal government can’t afford such an expense because of its own perilous financial condition.  Furthermore, federal aid would just delay the fundamental changes in fiscal policy which must be made at the state and local level.
It is a very bad idea for the federal government to bail out Detroit!