President-Elect Barack Obama has chosen former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle as his Secretary of Health and Human Services and health care czar. Daschle lays out his ideas about how to fix the ailing U.S. health care system in his book Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis, which was published in February 2008.
In Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis
Every group involved in health care – patients, employers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, politicians (Democrats and Republicans), hospitals, the government, and doctors and other providers – is part of the problem, and Daschle says the only way to fix the problem is for all of them to share responsibility for changing it. Personally, I think he nails that one right on the head.
What Daschle proposes as a sort of framework to help all the pieces come together, fix the problem, and keep it functioning at a high level is what he calls a “Federal Health Board.” Basically this would be composed of a group of experts who are appointed by the President for a 10 year term (long enough to outlast even a two-term President) and must be approved by the Senate. The goal would be to insulate the group from political wrangling and to instead focus on determining which treatments work and are the most cost effective using unbiased data and research.
He would also give this group the power to set standards so that decisions about which procedures and treatments are effective and recommended are not being decided by elected officials who always have one eye on the next election. Daschle also says the board must be accountable to Congress and must be transparent so that it will have the trust necessary to do that job.
While for many Americans, handing over that kind of power to people we can’t throw out in two, four, or six years might sounds scary, we’ve already had a taste of what elected officials interjecting themselves into health care decisions looks like in the Terri Schiavo case, and I don’t think anyone wants to go down that road again.
When Daschle wrote Critical earlier this year, he used a familiar model in a different area of government as comparison to help explain how this would work. Unfortunately for him, the model he picked – the Federal Reserve Board and how it handles U.S. monetary policy – probably isn’t what he would chose now to try and sell this idea.
So how would this plan affect employers? First, Daschle seems to favor a mandate for employers to either provide health insurance or to pay into a fund that would provide insurance for their workers and a mandate for all individuals to have insurance either on their own or through their employer. Second, he lays out several ways to cut health care costs that should also improve care. This should reduce employers’ costs to provide insurance and also should result in healthier employees. Third, new options would be created for employers who want to provide insurance to their employees, such as tapping into a federal health insurance pool. But employers wouldn’t be able to dump just their employees who are the most expensive into that pool while keeping their less expensive workers.
While I suspect that what Daschle outlines in the book won’t be identical to whatever health reform is finally proposed, it does provide helpful insight into what the man who will likely be in charge of making the U.S. health care system healthy for everyone is thinking.
Wendi Watts is the Web content specialist at M. Lee Smith Publishers and editor of HR Hero Line. Before moving to the online world at HRHero.com, Wendi worked as an editor for the state Employment Law Letters. She has worked as an editorial assistant for the IT Division at Middle Tennessee State University, was the school and community liaison for Rutherford County Schools in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and was a journalist at two Middle Tennessee newspapers.
1 thought on “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis”