Fixing Health Care Is Good for Business

by The_Cynic | August 27, 2009 at 07:20 pm

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Emotions are a good thing especially when you have to put out a fire, but when it is speaking on a pure business level, leave the fire truck outside.

There has been a lot of talk about the 47 million Americans who do not have health insurance. But health-care reform is just as important to the majority of Americans who have health insurance now. Absent reform, the price of an average family's insurance will nearly double over the next decade—to $25,000 from $13,000.

No less troubling are the stories I hear from CEOs, entrepreneurs and workers. Rising health-care costs are crushing American companies—particularly small businesses that are the source of much of our economic vitality.

Of course there is, as has been for the last 60 or more years, debates - if you can call them that - about healthcare in the US, and so far all real reform to get he US into the mid 20th century has fallen flat.

But, and this is a big but, one of the arguments is that healthcare was relatively cheap(ish). Now not so much. In a pure business setting - and if I were a business man in the US, I would advocate that the people I employ go get their own insurance - and that is going to happen, simply down to the specifics of the bottom line.

Healthcare, as a cost, regardless of the tax breaks, is too high - and those nasty accountants know it. Economists can be listened to as much as listening to a football match - and the outcome can be as confused - yet when you look at the figures, it is obvious why businesses are looking more toward that elusive public option as well - it will mean a lot less cost for business.

In 1960, U.S. firms spent 1.2% of their payroll on health insurance. In 2006, they spent 9.9%. Costs rising at this rate are unsustainable and put U.S. firms at a competitive disadvantage to foreign companies that almost universally have lighter health-care burdens. It also destroys U.S. jobs.

You can bleat as much as you like about healthcare and how you will not pay for someone eles' healthcare, but one thing that is proven to work for most, not all, but most of those sitting in the US Senate is campaign funding - with a rise in cost as seen in that quote business will be telling their GOP sponsored lackeys to get healthcare reform through or 'we' won't give you another penny!

Again, if you are all out against healthcare reform, then you are against Americans working - you are against American job creation, you really are against your own interest when that prospective job flies away because you didn't want healthcare reform - it is as simple as that.

Last month, the nonpartisan Rand Corporation released a study that looked at 37 industries from 1987 to 2005 and concluded that excess health-care costs were causing significant job losses as well as revenue and output losses for many American industries.

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