Healthcare Reform - Business Roundtable

In this post, I am going to add more detail to my previous posts in order to adress these questions:

1. Is there really a healthcare "crisis"?

2. Is the issue just about the uninsured?

3. Are the proponents of healthcare reform really just socialists in disguise?


All of these questions can be answered in a single document - the study produced by the Business Roundtable. Before going into the study, let me tell you who the Business Roundtable (BR) is. Th BR is a group of CEOs from America's largest corporations. As stated on their website: "Business Roundtable is an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies with more than $5 trillion in annual revenues and more than 10 million employees. Member companies comprise nearly a third of the total value of the U.S. stock markets and pay nearly half of all corporate income taxes paid to the federal government." The companies involved are named on the web and include a "who's who" of US corporate elites - from Boeing to GE to Exxon to Yahoo to American Express to Coca-Cola, etc etc etc



The BR is so concerned about the growing cost of healthcare that they commissioned a study by Hewitt Associates (a large consulting firm with a long record of involvement in employee benefits). This report, dated September 2009, is called "Health Care Reform: the Perils of Inaction and the Promise of Effective Action". It states unequivocally that "Doing nothing is simply no longer an option".

According to the report, total healthcare cost per employee has risen from $4,918 in 2001 to $10,743 in 2009. It further projects that the cost per employee will rise to $28,530 by 2019! And it states "America's businesses cannot win in the marketplace when bidding against global companies shouldering significantly lower healthcare cost burdens" and further "runaway healthcare costs are threatening the employer-based system that provides coverage for the majority of Americans and their families today".

BR points out that the approximately $2.4 trillion dollars that America spent on healthcare in 2008 "is as much as we spent on food, clothing and national defense combined!" And, "If our healthcare spend was a country, it would be the 7th largest in the world, larger than the total domestic output of Italy, Russia, Spain, Brazil or Canada!"

Without change, health-related spending will consume 20% of GDP by 2019 and "will outstrip increases in cash wages causing a decline in consumer purchasing power that will hinder economic growth".

The report goes on in detail about recommendations for reform all of which conform with my previous blogs - so no need to rehash the specifics. It closes by saying "We need game changing strategies and we can't wait much longer."

So - Is there a crisis? You bet there is!

Is the issue only about the uninsured? No - it effects every family in the US and is a major concerm for the prosperity of all Americans.

Is this just a socialist agenda in disguise? Well, I seriously doubt that the CEOs who represent 1/3 of the US stock market and half our corporate tax revenues are secretly all marxists!