Key to affordable universal health care is Medicare-for-all, says insurance expert

Oct. 3, 2005 -- Merton C. Bernstein, a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Coles Professor of Law Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis, will speak about universal health care coverage during the upcoming Older Women's League 25th anniversary national convention Oct. 6-9 in Sacramento, Calif. His current comments on the U.S.' insurance problem follow:

"Imagine an electrical appliance industry with plugs of 9,000 different shape and sizes that need one of 9,000 matching sockets to work. Preposterous as that is, that's the "design" of American health insurance - tens of thousands of medical care providers must plug their billions of billings into thousands of differing insurance policies," Bernstein says.

Merton Bernstein

Download

Medical care providers and insurers must employ armies of clerical staff to match billions of billings with the appropriate provision of the applicable insurance plan. For example, when Massachusetts General Hospital increased its medical staff by 10%, its billing department employment shot up 32%.

"This wasteful design has its silver lining," he says. "Eliminating administrative costs through universal Medicare coverage, or Medicare-for-All, would save as much as $280 to $300 billion a year, enough to pay for covering the 45 million uninsured. Medicare-for-All also might pay for everyone's prescription drugs, if Congress changed the law to allow Medicare to bargain with pharmaceutical companies about drug prices.

"Medicare has been up and running for 40 years and has already addressed the issues that inevitably confront a large-scale health insurance program. Its administrative costs are roughly 2% - not the average 13.6% that private insurance carriers incur. We need only apply Medicare's benefit package and procedures to everyone and pay for it by pooling what we already spend on our innumerable private and public programs."

Bernstein notes that drastically reducing per capita medical costs would rescue business, state and local government and personal budgets now drowning in multi-year double-digit health care cost increases.

"Substituting uniform premiums for those that vary by age and sex also would reduce a major cause of job discrimination against the elderly and women of childbearing age," he says.

"American business needs the savings and predictability of Medicare-for-All."