Your Employee Health Care Plan: Will It Be Better, or Worse?

“Health overhaul to force changes in employer plans,” the headline said. And according to an Associated Press story, health care reform will force many employers to make changes in employee health care plans.

Immediately some politicians and “pundits” sounded the alarm. Hadn’t President Obama promised that people could keep the health care plans they had before health care reform? Now they’ll have to settle for worse insurance plans, the alarmists said.

But a closer reading of the news stories shows the alarmists had jumped to the wrong conclusions.

Here are some of the changes that will have to be made to employee plans:

• Eventually, plans must eliminate copayments for preventive care.
• Federal guidelines will go into effect to make it easier for policy holders to appeal disputed claims.
• Beginning in September, plans must offer coverage to the children of employees until they reach the age of 26.

Naturally, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose purpose these days is to protect the interests of big multinational corporations, doesn’t like any of this. But the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of leading U.S. companies, say the changes aren’t necessarily going to be bad for business. The CEOs of the Business Roundtable think the new system may be more flexible, but on the whole they are withholding judgment.

Health care reform is just one of a complex of issues that touch on the special concerns of people with mesothelioma, a deadly lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. Other issues in this same complex include “tort reform,” which means changing the law to make it harder to people to file personal injury lawsuits. Workplace safety is another of these issues, because most people with mesothelioma were exposed to asbestos on the job. Time and time again, we find the same cluster of organizations and politicians lined up against the reforms real people really need to get on with their lives.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is high on the list of organizations that work against the interests of mesothelioma sufferers. For all the Chamber’s caterwauling about cost, some economists say the money spent to reform the system should pay for itself and save more money down the road. For example, elimination of copays should encourage people to take advantage of preventive care, reducing the chances of more serious illness, and this in turn could reduce costs in the health care system overall.

And for years young adults have made up a big part of the uninsured population. They either don’t get insurance through their jobs or think they don’t need it. But when younger and healthier people are not paying into the insurance risk pool, the premiums for older and less healthy people are more expensive. Keeping all those 21-to-26 year olds in the pool may not be as big a drain on the employee health care system as the Chamber of Commerce claims it will be.

Even so, last week Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was all over news media calling for a repeal of health care reform. “Since its passage, Republican arguments against the bill have been repeatedly vindicated, even as the administration’s many promises about the bill have been called into question again and again,” McConnell said.

But in this case the President’s promise was that most people would be able to keep the insurance plans they had. He didn’t promise those plans wouldn’t be improved

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 9:17 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.