My lecture was on health care reform, and I asked the control room technician to please run through the DVD cues with me prior to the audience assembling. As we screened the different exhibits, all of which had to do with the debate underway in Congress, Joseph volunteered that he was from Ontario, and that the wait for a standard physical was 4 to 6 months.
As a young and healthy man, he didn’t have any particular complaints about Canada’s government-run, government-paid-for system, but he knew that you didn’t want to be seriously ill up north. And you never wanted to be in a hurry.
That’s the reality of single-payer, and most Americans appear to know a Joseph or two and thus to know the truth about government-run health care. The debate in D.C. seems to be mostly about how to pay for a system that very few people want actually to join.
Most employed adults are satisified with employer-provided coverage and are not in any hurry to be forcibly enrolled in a government-run, government-paid-for health care system. I speak to many audiences about health care, and always ask who is a proponent of the sort of radical changes to the health insurance system being pushed by President Obama and Speaker Pelosi.
Plenty of college students and a few of my law students think it sounds good, and a handful of senior citizens I have polled who hate the cost of their Medicare supplemental insurance agree, but overwhelming majorities of my audiences are opposed, and those who are self-employed adamantly so. The debate in D.C. is thus weirdly disconnected from the people whose lives it will impact.
There is one category that provides the exception to this general rule –employers. Some of my law firm’s clients and some executives in my broadcast audience are quietly preparing for the necessary analysis that will follow the passage of Obamacare by asking their personnel departments the obvious question: Will it make economic sense to discontinue health care coverage for my employees and instead push them into the government plan?
These employers –manufacturers, builders, entrepeneuers of all sorts– cannot yet get an answer to this question because they don’t have any specifics about costs from which they can make an informed decision.
But they all know they will have to “do the math” if the “government option/public plan” makes it into law. They cannot not do so for they owe shareholders and investors an objective assessment of what will improve their bottom lines.
If the “government option/public plan” costs $300 per employee per month and private sector insurance costs $350 per employee per month, the choice to push their workforce into the waiting arms of President Obama’s new bureaucracy will make itself.
As often as President Obama blandly assures the country that “if you like your health care you can keep it,” I think about the wide variety of executives who will quickly acknowledge the choice ahead for their companies.
This is one of the great unreported stories of 2009, but reporters are apparently so ignorant or uninterested in how the delivery of health care actually works, they haven’t yet begun to ask the country’s employers what they will do if indeed the votes are assembled and the money printed to pay for a great leap into the darkness of a government plan on a scale never seen anywhere on the globe.
Journalists should start with thier own employers. Given the pressure on media revenues these days, what publisher or broadcast executive will hesitate to fix and shift the cost of health care for their staffs to the federal government?
The debate over how to pay for the new system –a tax on soda or a massive hike on high earners– is an interesting diversion from the much more pressing but largely ignored story of who will actually be covered by the government plan.
In the next few weeks, as the debate enters the decisive phase, every American ought to be asking if this new “government plan” is really a debate about their own new health insurance. For many tens of millions of Americans it is. They just don’t know it yet.
Examiner columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com
