One of the biggest challenges faced by American businesses today is the cost of healthcare. You might be wondering why. After all, didn’t the Affordable Care Act fix health care? That’s a fair question and the only honest answer is, “No, it addressed health care but it didn’t fix it.”
How can that be? Well, nowhere in its 10,000 pages of regulations are there cost controls. To be fair, the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare) includes mechanisms that influence costs. But there is no direct guidance or regulations on costs.
Earlier this year, Fox Business reported that US health spending topped $3 trillion (based on 2014 figures) and grimly pointed out “the ACA does not guarantee that overall health spending will come down.”
In fact, US health spending is expected to climb to $3.35 trillion in 2016, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, as reported by Business Insider.
This is a big problem for business. Healthcare spending regularly appears in the list of top 5 concerns of American CEOs. According to a December 2014 article in Forbes Magazine, business spending on health care is over $620 billion per year.
That’s $620 billion per year that isn’t available to grow sales, develop new products, expand markets or create jobs. That’s $620 billion per year that our foreign competitors don’t have to pay for healthcare. That’s $620 billion standing in the way of the American dream – our dream.
High healthcare costs are a monkey on the backs of American business owners. One self-made business owner, Richard Master, has decided to do something about it. Unlike the mega corporations in the Health Transformation Alliance who are focused on improving their own healthcare, Mr. Master focused on solutions that benefit us all.
Mr. Master founded MCS Industries, Inc. in 1980. Based in Easton, PA, his company is a wholesale supplier of frames, prints and other art materials. When the cost of providing health care to his employees topped $1.5 million each year, after years of double digit increases, he decided to look into why. And it was shocking.
The first shocker was simply this: That “every physician in this country now has to spend $84,000, on average, just to interact with private health insurance companies.”
This is one of the costs that health economists lump into the category “billing and insurance-related costs” or “BIR.”
What they really should call it is “hassles of health insurance” These hassles impact us all – patients, doctors and hospitals – and they are literally eating our economy alive. Click here for nitty-gritty details.
Anyway, once Mr. Master saw how much dealing with private health insurance costs our medical providers, he couldn’t stop. He dug deep into the research, met with health policy economists, professors, other business owners, government experts both local and national, doctors, nurses, and everyday working people. He travelled to Canada and he consulted Taiwanese health care experts.
And he decided he had to do something to let the American people know what’s really going on. So he produced a documentary called “Fix It: Healthcare at the Tipping Point” which everybody – EVERYBODY – needs to see.
In it, he makes clear that in spite of the ACA,
- The cost of providing employee health benefits remains a burden on business.
- Health care continues to represent a worsening burden on employees and their families.
- Health care also remains a significant burden on our public employers, including state and local institutions, commanding tax revenues that could be spent on police and fire services, schools, parks and other social assets.
- A prime driver of healthcare costs is private heath insurance and the inefficiency it brings with hundreds of payers and thousands of insurance plans.
- Simplifying the healthcare transaction by shifting the payment mechanism to a single payer-type system would dramatically ease costs for employers, employees, doctors, and hospitals.
- Plus, this would introduce public accountability, which is sorely lacking in our current non-system.
Mr. Master asks the tough question, “Can we afford our current healthcare system?”
And he concludes that the answer is “No,we cannot.” Leaving private health insurance and its high costs in the system is a sacrifice that is simply too great.
See the documentary here: Fix It: Healthcare at the Tipping Point
