As bad as our health care system has become, I keep believing that Congress will fix it. But, it’s going to take something more than unaffordable prices, countless premature deaths, and a global pandemic to move our representatives to action. Might an army of corporate executives advocating for health care reform tip Congress to do right for the people?
Is it possible that a majority of Congress would listen to corporate lobbyists advocating for lower costs and greater simplicity in our health care system? After all, corporations support the campaigns of most members, and reap huge dividends from so doing. Corporations also spend crazy amounts of money subsidizing the cost of health insurance for their workers with far less to show for it.
A new study out of Stanford Graduate School of Business makes the case that employers spend far more than they realize on their workers’ health. We already know that administrative excess in our system costs us $600 billion a year. The researchers find that on top of high premiums, administrative “sludge” costs businesses tens of billions of dollars.
When you add up all the time that workers spend navigating health insurance processes, they are left with far less time to do their work. On top of that, they are less productive because of the stress they feel trying to get needed care for themselves or a loved one. And, they end up not going to work in order to deal with the dizzying reimbursement paperwork that usually accompanies the receipt of care.
The researchers calculate the financial impact of this administrative sludge. More than $20 billion each year in lost productivity from phone calls with health insurers. More than $25 billion each year from taking time off to deal with the hurdles. There’s another $95 billion a year in lost productivity because of job dissatisfaction linked to health insurance issues.
Employers could try on their own to fix these “dead-weight losses” that consume way too much of their employees’ time, as the researchers suggest. They believe that the issue is more that employers are asleep at the wheel, unaware of these indirect costs, than that insurers wield the power to behave as they please. Really?
The researchers mistakenly assume that there’s value in employers adding to their health care administrative costs. Employers can no more get the insurers to behave decently than the federal government. Just consider what happened at Amazon. Employers cannot identify “better performing” insurers; it’s virtually impossible to detect meaningful differences among insurers. (Yes, the non-profit insurers might sometimes be better-performing, but not always, and they are few and far between.)
If employers supported just two system simplifications that Congress could enact, as a start—regulated prices and regulated rules—not only would workers be healthier and more productive, but health care costs would come down. If they supported improved Medicare for All, their workers could sleep soundly at night and be more productive during the day, because they and their loved ones would have the access to care they needed.
Here’s more from Just Care:
