The health care debate is an interesting one. People are passionate on both sides of this issue. And for every comment I receive on this blog, I also receive a handful of emails from people who don’t want to express their opinions publicly. Liberals are mad at republicans because they view the republicans as obstructionists for standing in their way in passing health care reform. Republicans are the “party of no” say the liberals. And the conservatives and independents are mad at democrats for failing to listen to the people and attempting to pass a massive federal program despite waning public support.

As usual, I have a few opinions to share on both sides of this. But first let me tell you a story about a bus system.

The “T”
For those of you who don’t know much about Lawrence, let me give you a quick overview of our community. We’re a college town with a population of less than 100,000. Lawrence is a liberal community embedded in a conservative state. The views of our community are much different than they are for most of the Midwest. We have more in common philosophically with San Francisco than we do Wichita.

Several years ago we were deciding on whether or not Lawrence should have a public transportation system. Liberals explained how important the bus system would be to the community, and how it would be financially self-sustaining within a few years. Conservatives countered that Lawrence was just too small, and didn’t need a bus system. My point at the time was that there was no way that public transit would be self-sustaining financially, and that the debate needed to be on whether or not we, as a community, were willing to pay for a bus system.

The voters supported the bill, and Lawrence Transit, typically referred to as the “T”, was born.

To make a long story short, ridership has been abysmal. Lawrence has been losing approximately $2.5 million per year on the “T”. And at the last major election we were asked to vote for a significant sales tax increase in order to keep public transit afloat. And like good liberals, we voted for the tax increase to save the bus system.

So my question is this: Did our city’s liberals really believe that the bus system would be self-sustaining? Did they talk themselves into believing their wildly optimistic revenue projections? Or were the projections just distractions to begin with? Financial slight of hand so to speak. The truth is probably a little of both. Some of the liberals believed the financial projections because that’s what they wanted to believe. And others probably didn’t care. They were so determined that our city “needed” a bus system that they didn’t care about the future costs or flawed revenue projections.

Liberals wanted what they always want, and that’s for the government to step in and right social wrongs. Lawrence liberals felt like it was wrong for us not to offer public transportation to our community. But instead of debating the merits of public transportation in a city of less than 100,000 people, many of whom were already being served by KU’s bus system, they focused on their wildly optimistic projections of revenues to explain how there was no reason NOT to create a public transit system. At the time I viewed their reasoning as flawed and intellectually dishonest.

Give the Democrats their Props
The republicans were in control of Congress from 1994 to 2006 and failed to solve our country’s health care problems. I give a lot of credit to the democrats for moving forward and attempting to solve this problem. I think it’s interesting that often we condemn politicians for doing what’s in their own self-interest, and not doing what’s best for the country. But in this case we’re witnessing the democrats commit political suicide as they attempt to pass what they perceive as a solution to our country’s health care problems. And now many on the right are condemning the democrats for sticking to their principles.

But a word to democrats, your cry of republican obstructionism is lame. The democrats decided to throw a big party and didn’t invite the republicans. Don’t blame the republicans for whining about it. With significant majorities in the Senate and the House, and a democrat in the White House, democrats viewed this as their opportunity to pass a massive federal program to “fix” health care. They knew that fiscal conservatives would never get onboard with their plans, so they didn’t invite them to the party. They thought that they could force this legislation through Congress without the republicans. And now democrats are whining because they haven’t been able to pass this legislation despite majorities in the Senate and the House.

Liberals want what they always want, and that’s for the government to step in and right social wrongs. Liberals want nationalized health care, and this legislation is a significant step towards a single-payer, government run solution. I don’t begrudge liberals for this. But I do begrudge the intellectual dishonesty of many of their arguments for this legislation. I’ve already covered several in past posts, but here are a couple more.

Financial Slight of Hand #1: The president has repeatedly talked about the 10 year and 20 year projections for costs associated with their plan. But the numbers are flawed and misleading. In the first ten years, the program is paid for because we have almost ten years of tax increases and Medicare cuts, but most the benefits only kick in during the second half of this ten year projection. So we’re paying for the plan for ten years, but only receiving five years of benefits. Why? Because that was the only way to make the numbers work over the first ten years.

But the financial projections over the first 20 years are just as flawed and misleading. The 20 year projection is based on significant future budget cuts that are not included in the current legislation. Even the CBO recognizes that these budget cuts are never likely to happen, making the 20 year projection irrelevant.

Financial Slight of Hand #2: The administration continues to claim that by adding more people (the currently uninsured) to the health insurance pool, insurance rates will go down, even though most projections still show premiums on the rise with the passage of their bill. The plan is to force all Americans to buy health insurance. The reasoning is that since many of our “uninsured” are actually young, healthy Americans, adding them to the pool will reduce premiums. This is again flawed logic. Many of these young Americans will continue to go without coverage and risk the potential penalties. And it’s possible that forcing Americans to buy health insurance will be found to be un-Constitutional anyway.

But the people who are more expensive to cover will certainly enter the health insurance pool. People who cannot afford premiums because of health issues, and those who are currently denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, will drive up health insurance premiums.

Like the Lawrence liberals who focused on wildly optimistic revenue numbers for a public transportation system, democrats would rather make the case for expanding the government’s role in health care based off of flawed financial projections than the merits of the program. I’d call this intellectually dishonest.

Note: Here’s a post I wrote about Congress being empowered by their beliefs in healthcare reform.

I’ve been wanting to write this post for weeks, but have had little time on my hands. I’ve watched the so-called experts and talking heads spew opinions on why healthcare reform failed, and truthfully, I think most of them have missed the boat.

And I was incredibly shocked to see President Obama unveil his new plan for health care this week just days before the “bipartisan health care summit”. We’ll come back to this.

Failure of a Plan is often a Failure to Plan
It’s easy to look at what transpired the last few months and point to them as reasons why healthcare reform failed. Waning public support. The backroom deals. Artificial time lines. The lack of certain logical solutions in the plan such as tort reform or to allow insurance companies to compete across state lines. The size of the plan. And general mistrust of the process.

But as with most failed plans, it’s best to look at the beginning of the process, not the middle or the end.

Let’s take a college student preparing for a final exam as an example. The day before her test her car breaks down and she’s unable to spend the necessary time to cram for the test. She fails. Did she fail because her car broke down? Probably not. She failed because of the number of times she skipped class and never completed her homework along the way. She didn’t have a plan from the beginning of the class as how to succeed at the end of the class.

I think that President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have much in common with the student who flunked because she failed to execute a well designed plan.

Where President Obama Failed
I have spent a significant amount of time studying leadership and management. I have come to understand that leaders and managers require different skill sets to be successful. And that a president of a company, or a country, needs to have strong leadership and management skills to be successful.

There’s a common scenario described in many of the books about successfully managing people. Here’s the basic example:

A bad sales manager meets with his sales staff and tells them he wants them to increase their sales by 10% and walks out of the room.

A good sales managers meets individually with her sales people and asks them what their goals are for increasing their sales, how they plan to get there, and what assistance she can be along the way.

In the first scenario the staff feels disconnected with the goal. It seems arbitrary. There’s no “buy in” of the goal. There is no clear path to achieve the goal. And no support system in place for success.

In the second scenario the staff feels like they’re able to set their own goals and help to develop the process. They “buy in” to the goals because they’re the ones who set the goals. They are now responsible for meeting these goals. And what good managers often find out is that good employees will often set their goals higher than what the manager would have set them to be in the first place.

So what did the president do? He walked into a room and said “I want healthcare reform on my desk by this date” and he walked out. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi were now responsible for getting a bill on the president’s desk. But Congress had no “buy in” to the process. And certainly no clear direction as how to succeed.

What should the president have done? What would a good manager do? I can tell you what the good sales manager would have done. She would have pulled in several members of Congress, from the Senate and the House, and leaders from both parties, sat them all around a table, and said: “We need to fix health care. We need to control costs. We need to find a way to cover the people who cannot buy coverage — either because they can’t afford it, or have a pre-existing condition. And we need to maintain the high-quality of care we enjoy today. How do we accomplish this?” She would ask this group to provide an outline of a plan by a certain date, and ask THEM to set a date for when THEY would get a bill on her desk.

You now have “buy in” from both parties to the process. They have set their own goals and time lines. And now feel responsibility for meeting these goals.

Where Congress Failed
I have always thought of myself as a problem solver. I look at a problem with an open mind. Identify the problem. Set a goal. Accumulate information. Develop different scenarios. And then choose a path that solves the problem and accomplishes the goal.

Does anybody believe that this is how Congress, or more specifically Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, set out to fix health care?

No. They had a pre-determined outcome in mind — a large government solution. And from there they worked backwards to explain how their “solution” would cure the problems we face with health care. (Here’s a link to a previous post as to why the plan in Congress would lead to a single payer, government run system.)

My Advice to the President
I have been in favor of this “bipartisan health care summit”. Get the leaders from both parties, and from both the House and the Senate together. Sit them around a big table. President Obama needs to walk into the room with a large Hefty bag filled with shredded paper, throw it on the table, and say: “We’re starting over. We need to fix health care. We need to control costs. We need to find a way to cover the people who cannot buy coverage — either because they can’t afford it, or have a pre-existing condition. And we need to maintain the high-quality of care we enjoy today. How do we accomplish this?”

The Last Word
Well this would have been my advice. But now the president has unveiled his “new” health care plan just days before the summit. Republicans who had approached the summit with skepticism were right. It was all a ploy.

According to a new post on Rasmussen Reports:

“Just 38% of voters now favor the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. That’s the lowest level of support measured for the plan in nearly two dozen tracking polls conducted since June.”

The report goes on to say, “The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 56% now oppose the plan… Intensity remains stronger among those who oppose the push to change the nation’s health care system: 21% Strongly Favor the plan while 43% are Strongly Opposed.”

As Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “The most important fundamental is that 68% of American voters have health insurance coverage they rate good or excellent. … Most of these voters approach the health care reform debate fearing that they have more to lose than to gain.”

A friend of mine wrote to me: “You can google Public Option Opinion Polls and find some that say up to 76% of Americans support the aforementioned Public Option.”

I have seen this same stat repeated on the news. So I googled it. If you google that exact phrase, the first result is titled “New Poll: 77 Percent Support “Choice” Of Public Option”. It links to a Huffington Post article from August. The survey was done by a company called SurveyUSA that I’m unfamiliar with. I didn’t see any newer polls with similar results. But they certainly might be out there.

Here’s what else I found.

According to Gallup on October 21, 50% think that a public option should be included in the reform bill, and 46% do not:

And according to the Washington Post / ABC Poll from October 20, 57% support the public option:

I’m always skeptical of polls. Take it from somebody with a background in marketing, they can be manipulated. The polls I mentioned a few days ago have tracked opinion over time. I tend to find these a bit more trustworthy since if there are any built-in biases in the poll, hopefully that bias is consistent over time.

And truthfully, I think this is irrelevant.

One, I don’t think some Americans completely understand what the “public option” means. According to pollster Frank Luntz, if you replace the phrase “public option” with “government option”, the numbers in support of the option drops. Notice that Nancy Pelosi recently rebranded it to the be the “consumer option”. Why? I’m sure there’s some poll out there that says that a “consumer option” is more favorable when compared to a “public option”. Which really just means that the person polled doesn’t understand the difference in the first place.

And two, if the public option is really just the path to a single payer, government run system as I believe, then support of the public option becomes irrelevant. (See my post here about the public option.) People are strongly opposed to government run health care. And they should be.

One last comment. What do we continue to hear from supporters of the public option? That it is necessary to create competition in order to drive down insurance premiums. However, these bills continue to prohibit insurance companies from competing across state lines. We allow insurance companies in other industries (auto, life, home) to compete across state lines. Why not health insurance?

The answer is easy. The endgame is not the public option. The endgame is government run health care. The public option is just the road that gets us there.

Just a couple of years ago, according to Gallup, 69% of those polled said that making sure that all Americans had healthcare coverage was the government’s responsibility. That number has dropped by 22 points. Today, Americans no longer think that this is the government’s responsibility. (See Gallup’s complete story here.)

This is a significant swing in public opinion over the last two years. And I think it’s easily explained.

1. In general, we are a giving people. And we want problems fixed. We’ve been told for years that we have a significant problem in our country. Health care is too expensive, and too many people are uninsured. And since individually we can do little to solve this problem, we believe that our government should fix this problem.

2. Most people do believe that health care is a right, and that we all deserve the same high quality of care.

3. On the surface, government run health care, or a public option, sounds fine. After all, this will solve our problems. Won’t it?

But as Americans learn more about government run health care, or even the public option, they don’t want it.

Overwhelmingly, Americans do NOT want to replace our current system with a government run system:

I continue to believe that the “public option” will lead us to government run health care.

Americans have watched how the government has mismanaged two wars, mismanaged our economy, and has failed to save or create jobs despite spending our money like a drunken sailor. We do not want government run health care. Unfortunately, Congress and the White House has decided that they know better.

The healthcare bill that recently passed the House is atrocious. It will not fix our health care problems. It will only further hurt our economy and destroy job creation. And put our country further in debt.

I’ve had several discussions with friends about proposed health care legislation in Congress. I’m on record that we badly need healthcare reform in this country. But I oppose a move towards a government run system. And my continued fear is that the “public option” being discussed is the piece that ultimately leads us in that direction. (I’ve made my case for why the public option will lead to a government run system here.)

There is continued frustration from the opposition that the left won’t address their concerns about the inherent problems with the proposed bills. And even more directly, that the left is dishonest with their “facts”. My opinion? The supporters of these bills do not care about the facts.

*****

In order to make my point, let’s remove this from health care for a moment. We all know that Al Gore is the Nobel Prize winning poster boy for climate change. And many have accused him of distorting the facts about global warming. Even those who agree with him that something must be done have condemned him for his exaggerations. But Al Gore justifies his exaggerations because it’s for the greater good. This is from a 2006 interview with Grist:

Q. There’s a lot of debate right now over the best way to communicate about global warming and get people motivated. Do you scare people or give them hope? What’s the right mix?

A. I think the answer to that depends on where your audience’s head is. In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

Over time that mix will change. As the country comes to more accept the reality of the crisis, there’s going to be much more receptivity to a full-blown discussion of the solutions.

Why is this relevant? Al Gore is empowered by his belief that we must react to the dangers of global warming. And since the facts are not shocking enough to push people to action, then an exaggeration of the facts is required.

*****

I would make the same case that those who are pushing these healthcare reform bills through Congress are following a similar approach. Since healthcare reform is required for the greater good, an exaggeration of the facts is required. Or in this case, dismissing certain facts is required. When you are empowered by your beliefs that health care is a right, and that we must provide universal coverage for everybody, then the facts be damned.

Examples? There are plenty.

Healthcare reform will be deficit neutral. Nobody really believes this do they? The Congressional Budget Office has predicted huge budget deficits in our future as a result of these proposed bills.

Preventative medicine will reduce costs. I’m in favor of preventative medicine. This is another topic I’ve already covered here. It does not appear likely that it will reduce costs.

Digitizing of health care records will reduce costs. While this might be a great idea, I’ve yet to read anything that leads me to believe that this will reduce costs.

There will be no rationing of care. Of course their will. Show me one government run health care system in the world that has not had to ration care.

The quality of our health care will improve. How? And why do citizens of Canada come to the United States when they get sick?

The public option will provide competition to the insurance companies. If Congress was truly interested in creating greater competition, they would allow insurance companies to compete across state lines. But the public option is not to create competition, but ultimately to replace the insurance companies and create a government run system.

The list is long. These are only a few examples.

And then you look at what has been left out of the bills. In particular they have failed to address tort reform, where the CBO has recently projected that tort reform would save $54 billion over the next ten years. Read more here.

It’s difficult to have an intelligent discussion when the opposition cares little about the facts.

Cartoon by: Gavin McNeil

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has completed their analysis of tort reform, and has sent their findings to Senator Orrin Hatch. What did they find? That the net effect of tort reform on the federal budget would save $54 billion over the next ten years.

From the report:

“CBO now estimates, on the basis of an analysis incorporating the results of recent research, that if a package of proposals such as those described above was enacted, it would reduce total national health care spending by about 0.5 percent (about $11 billion in 2009). That figure is the sum of the direct reduction in spending of 0.2 percent from lower medical liability premiums, as discussed earlier, and an additional indirect reduction of 0.3 percent from slightly less utilization of health care services. (That reduction is the estimated net effect of the entire package listed earlier, although some components of that package might increase the utilization of physicians’ services, as has already been noted.) CBO’s estimate takes into account the fact that because many states have already implemented some of the changes in the package, a significant fraction of the potential cost savings has already been realized.

“In the case of the federal budget, enactment of such a package of proposals would reduce mandatory spending for Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Federal Employees Health Benefits program by roughly $41 billion over the next 10 years.”

And then later in the report:

“By reducing spending on health care in the private sector, the package of proposals discussed here would also affect federal revenues. Much private-sector health care is provided through employment-based insurance that represents nontaxable compensation. Lower costs for health care arising from those proposals would lead to higher taxable wages and thereby increase federal tax revenues by an estimated $13 billion over the next 10 years, according to estimates by the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). Combining the effects on both mandatory spending and revenues, a tort reform package of the sort described earlier in this letter would reduce federal budget deficits by roughly $54 billion over the next 10 years. That estimate assumes that a change enacted in 2010 would have an impact that increased over time, achieving its full effect after four years, as providers gradually changed their practice patterns. Of course, the estimated effect of any specific legislative proposal would depend on the details of that proposal.”

Read the full report here.

Why is tort reform nowhere to be found in current proposals for health care reform? Politics. Compare these numbers for political contributions to democrats and republicans from the American Association for Justice (formerly the Association of Trial Lawyers of America) according to the website OpenSecrets.org.

Cartoon came from the Tortellini.com.

The point of this post is not to directly debate the merits of the public option. But to understand better what the public option means for us. Many on the left would prefer a single payer, government run health care system. President Obama is on record for wanting a single payer system (before he ran for president). But the majority of Americans do not want a single payer, government run health care system. We don’t trust the government to run it well or efficiently. We’ve seen the huge amounts of money wasted in Medicare and Medicaid. We’ve seen the poor health care our veterans receive in VA hospitals. My opinion, and my fear, is that the “public option” in the current legislation is really a single payer system in waiting.

Competition
Politicians who support the public option say that it provides competition to the insurance companies, which they say is good for America. (However, they currently restrict how insurance companies compete with each other, but that can be discussed in another post.) Let’s take this out of the health care setting for a moment and provide an easy to follow analogy. Let’s say that in your hometown there are three stores that sell TVs. And the average price of a TV is $300.

Well for a store to make money and survive, they have to buy the TVs for less than they sell them for. So they buy a TV for $200, and sell it for $300. With three stores in your town, there is competition, which keeps prices competitive and keeps the store owners from charging $400 for a television. But even at $300, not everybody can afford a television.

The government decides that it is important for every American to own a TV. And they want to offer Americans a more affordable option. So the government opens a store in your hometown and sells the same TV for $200. They say this will increase competition, and allow all Americans to afford a television. And it will force the privately owned stores to lower their prices.

So what happens to the privately owned stores? How can they afford to compete with the government who does not need to make money on the TVs they sell? They may look for new ways to remain profitable and remain in business, but eventually most of them will stop selling TVs. Choices will become limited. And eventually, the only choice will be the government store.

But what happens next? Well the government realizes that it can’t sustain selling the TVs for $200 because there are other expenses involved in selling TVs. Not just the cost of the television. They go the manufacturer and say “We need to be able to buy that TV from you for $100 so we can sell it for $200 to cover more of our expenses.” The manufacturer has two options: sell TVs to the government store for less money, or stop selling TVs. Their only “customer” is now the government store. If they sell the TV for less money, do you really think they’ll continue to make the same quality of television? Not a chance. They can’t. They will begin using less expensive, and inferior components.

The United States Postal Service
I’ve seen many who criticize government run health care make comparisons to the United States Postal Service. But they’re making the wrong analogy. Yes, the post office loses money, which means that it is partially supported by tax dollars. But it doesn’t lose money necessarily because the government is incapable of running the USPS efficiently. It loses money because that’s what the government WANTS it to do. For the USPS to be self-sufficient, it would require raising prices, and limiting service. Two things the government does not want to do. The government would prefer to subsidize the post office through our tax dollars than they would to make the system profitable. Or even self-sustaining. Since they’re not willing to make the decisions required to make the post office profitable, there is no incentive to make it efficient either.

Back to Health Care
So here are my biggest concerns with the public option:

1. It will eliminate competition (the insurance companies).

2. It will decrease the quality of care as they force doctors and hospitals to accept less money for services rendered.

3. It will have to further limit the availability of care.

4. The government will have no intention of making the system self-sustaining, which means it will likely cost the tax payers a lot of money. And like Medicare and Medicaid, it will waste billions and billions of tax payer dollars.

We need health care reform in this country. And we need it badly. But it does not need to contain a public option to fix our problems.

After writing a few weeks ago that there are differences of opinion on potential cost savings associated with preventative medicine, I received some comments that I must be against health care reform. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve been an advocate of health care reform since the ’90s when I first became interested in politics and social issues.

As those who know me would expect, I have several opinions on health care reform. Too many to put in one post. So for this post, I’d like to provide a little background perspective. I have been exposed to the user side of health care from a few different perspectives.

A Broke Musician
In the late ’80s and early ’90s I was a full-time musician making very little money. My parents were going through their own financial problems. My dad had lost everything in the crash of ‘87. My mom had mismanaged her money badly, and was close to losing the farm. Literally. Upon realizing that if anything happened to me it would become a financial burden on them, I went out and got health insurance and life insurance. I certainly didn’t have any spare money at that point in my life, but my parents had been through enough, and I had no intention of adding to their problems because I had been too irresponsible to pay for my own insurance.

A Young Entrepreneur
In ‘93 I became business partners with Billy Pilgrim. He had started a small graphic design business called PilgrimPage. I thought I could help. Much like our days in music, we were making very little money. But we were used to that. During the first couple of years, the company paid for our health insurance, and not much else. I was working nights running sound for bands at local bars for money to live on.

To the Booth
As PilgrimPage continued to struggle financially, and I continued to struggle financially, I took a job as a tollbooth collector for the Kansas Turnpike Authority in ‘96, basically working nights and weekends so that I could continue to work at PilgrimPage during the days. The turnpike provides great health insurance, and I was able to drop my personal policy. The coverage covered me and my family. Very nice.

PilgrimPage Takes Off
Or so it seemed at the time. After years of struggling, PilgrimPage was finally developing a nice client base. By 2000 it really seemed we were in position to take off. I cut my hours at the turnpike to part-time, which means I lost my “free” health insurance. My wife was pregnant (a pre-existing condition) so I had no choice but to continue my turnpike health care insurance through COBRA at a cost of about $650 per month. Yikes.

The Recession of 2001
As quickly as PilgrimPage began taking off in the late ’90s, it began slumping in 2001. We were hitting the recession, and our biggest clients were all packing it in. Money was tight, and I was regretting leaving my full-time position at the turnpike. During this time we launched our promotional products website Absorbent, Ink., and it was really Absorbent, Ink. that provided our financial salvation. And my next exposure to the problems with health care.

A Growing Business
Throughout this decade, Absorbent, Ink. achieved amazing growth. In 2003 we had a staff of five. By 2008 we had a staff of 45. Having witnessed what a lack of health coverage can do to a person or family, Billy and I had always wanted to offer health insurance for our staff. But it’s really expensive. When we were finally able to afford a group policy, I think we were more excited than the staff.

Exposure to health insurance from the business side was definitely a new experience. I had seen increasing premiums as a consumer, but these increases are really magnified when you’re a small business owner. We were seeing yearly increases in premiums from 15-25%. And quickly we were exposed to flaws in the system. Here are just a couple of them:

1. In Kansas, when you have a group health coverage policy, you must offer the policy to every employee who averages 30 or more hours per week. And the employer must pay at least 50% of the coverage. This is fine, but what about those who work less than 30? We had a number of employees who worked only 20 hours per week. Why could we not offer our coverage to these employees if they were willing to pay 100% of the coverage? Don’t ask me.

2. As a small business, your premiums are dictated by the profile of your staff. Early on our staff was very young. Younger males are the cheapest to insure. And having young males on your staff keep your insurance premiums down. As Absorbent, Ink. grew and we were able to afford to pay higher salaries, we were able to attract a more experienced (older) staff. With this comes a change in our profile, and increases in premiums. If you have 20 people in your profile, and you shift your profile by replacing three male employees in their 20s with three employees who are 20-30 years older, the rates for the entire group increase significantly.

Fixing Health Care
These are only two of the many problems that need to be addressed in health care reform. Businesses should be allowed to offer premiums to part-time employees. And small businesses need to be able to pool together to get better rates and better protection to changing premiums. Hopefully over the next few weeks I’ll find the time to write a bit more.

I’ve been a political junkie for years. I enjoy reading about politics, and trying to understand why things happen the way they do. I’m a registered independent with no love for either party, so watching the Republicans and Democrats go at it for me is almost as much fun as a good football game between two teams that aren’t my hometown team. I’m not talking about issues here. Just the posturing of the two parties, and how each chooses to push their agendas.

Two quick things to cover in this post.

One, I enjoy reading the site PolitiFact. They take comments made by politicians, media and activists, and break them down with their Truth-o-Meter. They are fairly unbiased, and put good thought and research into their comments. I don’t always agree with their conclusions, but I’ve gotten to the point that I trust their intent.

And secondly, while I don’t intend to jump into the middle of the great healthcare debate right now, there is a PolitiFact post that is relevant and meaningful to claims made by the administration. One ongoing discussion I’ve had with people for years is preventative medicine. Many have made the case that if our insurance companies encouraged preventative medicine, that it would drive down costs, and lead to better healthcare for the insured. My primary disagreement with this assertion has always been, do you not think that the insurance companies have already studied this? Insurance companies are in business to make money. If they thought that pushing preventative medicine would reduce their costs, they’d do it. PolitiFact, citing studies from the Congressional Budget Office,  American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society, agrees that preventative medicine would not necessarily reduce costs. Read more here.