PRINT
EMAIL
COMMENT
BUZZ UP
DIGG
OUR PREMIUM CONTENT
The Kiplinger Agriculture Letter
The Kiplinger California Letter
Kiplinger's Biofuels Market Alert
Kiplinger's Retirement Report
SUBSCRIBER HELP
CURRENT LETTER
2009: A Rough Start
But a Better Finish
PREVIOUS ISSUES
Anthony P. Rienzi is a health and productivity consultant in the New York office of Buck Consultants, a gloal human resources consulting firm and an ACS company. His expertise covers a broad range of issues including benefits strategy and design, vendor management, health promotion and disability management.
Chantel Sheaks works out of Buck's Washington office in the research, survey, and knowledge management (RSKM) group. Her responsibilities include serving as a technical expert and spokeswoman in regard to Buck’s interpretation of and position on regulations, legislation, and court decisions. In addition, Chantel develops and maintains working relationships with governmental staff, legislative staff, legislators, and employee benefits industry leaders.
Immense and growing pressure by individuals and the business community to rein in health care costs and improve access for the uninsured guarantee that health reform will be a more dominant issue in this presidential campaign than in any since 1992. While the approaches of Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama are vastly different, both plans would be a profound change in how we insure ourselves and would have a drastic impact on many businesses, especially smaller ones.
"Although their objectives are similar, the candidates take very different routes to reach them," Anthony Rienzi and Chantel Sheaks write in a white paper for Bucks Consultants titled The Obama and McCain Health Care Platforms: A Guide for Employers. "The Obama platform leans more heavily on public sector institutions and regulatory requirements whereas the McCain platform prefers tax incentives and other strategies to promote free market activity and encourage individual responsibility."
The guide closely examines the three areas of the candidates' reform plans that will most directly affect employers: insurance portability, mandates and consumer driven health care. McCain and Obama have vastly different ideas about how to ensure that workers can maintain coverage for themselves and their families if they change jobs or even lose one, for example. Obama still emphasizes a system based on employer-provided insurance. He would set up a system under which companies that do not provide insurance would pay into a fund that would make insurance available to the uninsured. McCain, in perhaps the most radical change proposed in either plan, would put more responsibility on the insured by taking away the tax benefits of employer-provided insurance and replacing it with tax credits that could be used to buy private individual policies.
Especially useful are the questions that the authors say are raised by each plan. Some particularly tricky ones that should be explored during the campaign and when Congress tries to draft a reform measure include:
• "If employers are not the primary source for medical coverage, will they still be inclined to promote health and wellness in the workplace? If not, would the government fill the void?"
• "Does an employer 'pay or play' mandate as advocated by Obama make it more difficult for U.S. companies to compete globally? Is coverage expansion through mandates worth the potential cost to the U.S. economy?"
• "Is a free market solution as advocated by McCain preferable, even if a large number of Americans remain uninsured or if coverage expansion goals take many years to achieve?"
E-Mail Article
Print Article
