As I have been saying all along, the single #1 imperative with health reform must be an increased ability to reduce the growth in healthcare spending. I firmly believe that the most important benefit we provide as an employer is a paycheck, and preserving and creating well paying jobs is absolutely essential to a robust economy and a job producing recovery. Healthcare costs crowd out jobs, and cost control creates more capacity for jobs.
H.R. 3962 fails this litmus test on all accounts. We have absolutely nothing that controls long term costs-NOTHING! But we do have new spending, new taxes, new fees, new employer mandates, new regulatory bodies and new requirements for payers and health insurers. All of which will drive up premiums and all of which will cost jobs.
I am in the process of culling through the 1990 pages as we speak, although I am reluctant to invest too much time or energy in the specifics because the direction in the Senate is so much different from the House. In the meantime, their is a nice summary of the perspective of employers in Employee Benefit News. Here are some of the highlights:
“Today’s passage of the U.S. House of Representatives version of sweeping health legislation makes the U.S. Senate the last hope for a balanced, responsible measure that might have some chance for bipartisan support,” says James A. Klein, president of the American Benefits Council.
“As we have stated repeatedly over the past several months, the House bill’s regulatory framework will, unintentionally, compel many employers to cease offering health coverage and simply ‘pay’ a penalty rather than ‘play’ through sponsoring a plan – thereby losing all the innovation that employers bring through promoting wellness programs and insisting on good quality outcomes,” says Klein.
Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, which represents about 280 large U.S. employers, identified 10 major items that should concern plan sponsors that provide health care benefits to their workers. According to Darling:
1) the bill lacks meaningful ways to control health care costs;
2) the bill takes us down the road to even worse deficits and crushing national debt by not getting more savings from the health system and making the coverage more affordable;
3) there is no support for strong evidence-based medicine or a way to make certain that we don’t pay for treatments that are not effective;
4) there is not a strong independent Commission that could help Congress make the politically hard but obvious good decisions to eliminate wasteful and harmful treatments and spending;
5) it does nothing to correct medical liability problems and related costly defensive medical practices;
6) it doesn’t expand employers’ ability to help employees to actively engage in wellness activities or achieve health goals;
7) it undermines ERISA and opens ERISA plans to unacceptable burdens;
8. there are serious questions about the public plan and how it would operate;
9) an employer who provides comprehensive benefits could still be subject to an 8% payroll tax if employees decline employer coverage because it costs more 12% of the employee’s income; and
10) it contains a particularly outrageous requirement that any employer still offering retiree medical coverage would have to continue it indefinitely thereby hurting employers who have done what they could to maintain benefits for retirees.
I’ll have more later as we complete our review and analysis. In the meantime, let us know what you think!
