'No reform' not an option

— As executive director of the non-profit Arkansas Public Policy Panel, I lead an organization with a small number of employees, all relying on the panel for health insurance.

As with many small businesses or non-profits, health insurance is consuming an ever increasing amount of our budget. Over the past ten years, our health insurance costs have climbed nearly 20 percent per year, while our insurance provider reported record profits. We can't keep this up. It's one of the main reasons that companies cut benefits and thousands of Americans lose their insurance every day.

It's even worse for small employers like us because insurance companies charge a steep penalty for being small or independent. We pay well over twice as much for insurance than my wife's employer pays, even though we have nearly identical plans from the same company. Why the difference? We employ only eight workers, while she works for a large institution with hundreds of employees. The penalty for being small really hits a state like Arkansas because so many of our jobs are in small business.

These rising health costs are also wreaking havoc on American families. Harvard University found that 50 percent of all bankruptcy filings in this country are at least partly due to health care costs. Hospitals use bill collectors to take patients to court even when the patients have no ability to pay. An illness, accident or heart attack often leads to the financial ruin of a whole family.

It's high time we came together to fix our health insurance and health care situation. We need a system that makes health insurance affordable for small businesses, addresses the out-of-control costs of health care and covers the uninsured.

This is exactly what is being proposed in various bills before Congress. However, political pundits and alarmists would have you think this effort is in fact an attempt to turn our health care system into something akin to communism. That couldn't be further from the truth.

The truth is that not one of the viable pending health reform bills will force any health care plan on anyone. Period. Every one of these versions allows you to keep whatever plan you feel is best for you.

The biggest opposition to the bills is coming from corporate insurance monopolies that are hardly a model of freeenterprise. In Arkansas alone, Blue Cross Blue Shield controls a whopping 75 percent of the health insurance market share according to the American Medical Association. Blue Cross controls over 90 percent of the market in some Arkansas communities like Texarkana. Such a corporate-run health monopoly is not the type of environment that fosters choice and competition, and it locks many people out of access to the care they need.

The insurance monopolies are fighting health reform so hard because they fear a "public insurance option." They're spending millions to tell us that such an option will be so inexpensive and efficient that it will undercut private insurers and drive them all out of business, while also maintaining that we can't afford such an option because the government is so inefficient that costs will spiral out of control and bankrupt the nation.

So we should fear it because it's too cheap and too expensive? Talk about double talk!

The bottom line is that you will be able to keep the plan you have if you like it, but you will have the option of choosing a public option if you think it's better or cheaper. For a small employer like us,it means that we might finally have access to a plan that will not penalize us for being small.

These plans create greater choice for employers and employees alike, while ensuring that everyone has access to quality health care. They encourage competition by forcing the insurance industry to place more emphasis on quality and efficiency, they allow the government to negotiate lower prices with health care providers and drug makers, and they make the system more efficient and less bureaucratic. Opponents who are assailing these bills need to offer alternatives and not baseless accusations. It is certainly possible that there could be other ways to achieve a better health system-but "no reform" is not an option.

This shouldn't be a Republican or Democrat issue-both sides have some good ideas that should be judged on how they improve health care. When health care turns into a political weapon for grandstanding between the parties, then we all lose. We need reform now, before health care costs break the backs of yet another Arkansas family or business.

Bill Kopsky is the executive director of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel.

Perspective, Pages 78 on 08/30/2009

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