by RTT Staff Writer
4/23/2009
(RTTNews) – A panel of experts told the House Subcommittee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Thursday recommended potential reforms to reduce the cost of health care for employees, employers and their families.
Michael J. Langan of Principal at Towers Perrin manages a group of employee benefits attorneys who analyze legislative and regulatory issues affecting employer benefit and compensation programs, including retirement, health and welfare, executive compensation and other human resource issues. He urged immediate action be taken on health reform.
“These are times of extraordinary economic turmoil and challenges,” he said in prepared remarks. “Some have even suggested that health reform may need to wait until we address other more urgent economic recovery priorities.”
“We take the opposite view,” Langan continued. “Addressing the nation’s health policy challenges is an integral element of — rather than an obstacle to — economic recovery and personal financial security.”
Dr. David Himmelstein, a Harvard professor, proposed a single-payer plan that would cover all Americans and save taxpayers $400 billion annually.
The approach itself is controversial, and President Obama has suggested that it is off the table. However, Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that the Congressional Progressive Caucus “prefers a single-payer approach to health care reform.”
Under a single-payer system, doctors, hospitals and other health care providers are paid from a single fund administered by the government, which eliminates the wasteful spending and high administrative costs of private insurance, saving almost $400 billion annually. This is enough to provide every American with high-quality care, including those who currently have insurance but still cannot afford medications and treatment.
“[A] single-payer reform would make universal, comprehensive coverage affordable by diverting hundreds of billions of dollars from bureaucracy to patient care,” Himmelstein said in his testimony today. “Lesser reforms – even those that include a public plan option – cannot realize such savings. While reforms that maintain a major role for private insurers may be politically attractive, they are economically and medically nonsensical.”
President Barack Obama has made health care reform one of the five pillars of his path to economic recovery. In addition, his budget director Peter Orszag has said that “the path to fiscal responsibility must run directly through health careĆ¢ā¬Ā¦the single most important thing we can do to put the nation back on a sustainable (fiscal) course is slow healthcare costs.”
“It is the key to our fiscal future,” Orszag added.
In his $3.55 trillion budget proposal, Obama requested $635 billion to be set aside for an overhaul of the nation’s health care system.