Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Consumer-Directed Health Plans

It has been a little while since I have done a brain dump....I will do much more tomorrow, but as both an entrepreneur/business owner, health insurance expert, and card-carrying consumer-directed healthcare BELIEVER, I come back to my same old thoughts. Consumerism is the only thing that will save pricing/affordability in the United States for health insurance. Though Republicans and Democrats mean well, they rarely use all of their HOT AIR on the real topic to discuss - consumerism. We need to stick with high deductible health plans, corporate HRA's, and showing businesses all over the U.S. to take back the control.

All carriers are the same...they will bend you over a barrel to make their shareholders or state/local officials/unions (non-profit plans) happy with the "returns". I am not certain anything will make an impact more than consumerism - no exchanges, no single-payer system (the WORST IDEA in last 100 years)...a universal system where everyone has to be covered (to spread risk) sounds great, but it blew up literally in Hillary Rodham's face almost 20 years ago now...it will never work either.

If businesses en masse moved to consumer directed health plans, and the ridiculous bureaucrats in Washington would push everyone on to the same page, the first impact would be a RADICAL cost reduction in premium, probably a need for another TARP sytem bail-out but this time of health insurance carriers right out of the gate to prop them up for the first 18-36 months of the transition...they would take a "haymaker" to the side of the head upon inception, then would get used to it over time. The immediate impact would be mid 1990s pricing, think about that, wipe out 15 years of increases (just like the 15 yrs of 401k gains and real estate gains you did to us - oh yeah, thanks banks and unscrupulous bankers, CDS/derivative salesman and woman!!) - sounds too good to be true? No it is true.