United States House of Representatives
Government Reform Committee
Civil Service and Agency Organization Subcommittee
October 16, 2001
Representative Danny Davis: Mr. Moffit, I believe that you mentioned the fact that we need to get some new blood, or we needed to mix the demographics, that we needed different composition. And then I noted that Delegate Norton mentioned the fact that 58 is an average age (in the FEHBP program).
Robert Moffit, Director of Domestic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation: Right.
Rep. Davis: Are you suggesting in any way that we need to place more emphasis on fact, or in the end, the age of the population group that we’re dealing with, or that we need to do something to shift part of that age group out of the program?
Dr. Moffit: No. Congressman, I — what I’m saying is basically expand the program, and I think Mrs. Norton actually put her finger on it. You know, we want to be careful how we do this. A suggestion that I made in my formal testimony is to expand it to people who do have a direct relationship with the federal government, and that group are young military families who are enrolled right in the military health care system. You’re talking between five and six million people.
Young military families are healthy. Their national representatives have testified before Congress that they would like to be in the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program. But, the central value of it would be that it would improve the actuarial profile of the pool. As a result, it would stabilize…
Comment: This hearing got off to a poor start when Chairman Dave Weldon attempted to prevent DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton from presenting an opening statement with the comment, “… witnesses fly in from faraway places and sit and listen to members,” to which she responded, “… most of the witnesses here are flown in from the Office of Personnel Management and other far-flung parts of the District of Columbia.” Things only became worse with bumbling testimony on flawed policy concepts such as the need to end the tremendous “overutilization” in the program by making federal employees sensitive to costs by changing to catastrophic coverage.
The FEHBP is the largest health benefits program in the nation. It is facing the same problem as all other programs: the skyrocketing costs in health care. The size of this program and the great variety of plans offered have provided the testing grounds for controlling costs through private health plans. It has been a miserable failure. Robert Moffit suggests that we salvage this private sector solution (FEHBP) by diluting the risk pool with young, healthy military dependents, a proposal which, not coincidentally, furthers the agenda of the Heritage Foundation by privatizing the coverage of this group as well (the military dependents). But this will still do nothing to slow escalating health care costs. Mr. Moffit is correct when he suggests improving the risk pool, but we really need to adopt the ultimate risk pool, the one that includes everyone. And we need to eliminate the wasteful and ineffective health plans and replace them with a single, publicly administered, universal health insurance program, a model can effectively contain costs through global budgeting.