Peter Harbage on the Need for Health Reform

Why do we need health insurance reform?

We need health insurance reform because the fate of our economy is tied directly to what’s happening in health care today. We have a situation where families and businesses are all seeing their health care costs skyrocket and we simply can’t be competitive internationally while we let that continue so we need to take a step back and look at some of the key things we can do to make health care better, like bring premiums, insurance premiums under control, like finding better ways to have health information technology create an efficient system. We also need to look at how to help the uninsured. One of the main cost-drivers in the system is that we have so many uninsured people who only get care when they absolutely need it and seek care in the emergency room where it’s the most expensive, so we have to find a way to bring that population in and give them health insurance as well.

Who will benefit from health insurance reform?

Health reform is going to help everyone in our society because so much of our economy is tied into health care spending. But let me give you two groups that sometimes come as a surprise who’ll be helped by health reform. The first is those with insurance. There’s somehow this perception that health reform is only about helping the uninsured which something we absolutely have to do. But the reality is that we have such an efficient system, we have a system that involves high administrative costs; we have a system of delivering care that’s made more inefficient by the lack of health information technology that the groups of folks, one of the groups of folks who would be really and truly helped by health care reform are those who already have insurance today, because by creating amore efficient system we can contain costs, we can even bring costs down and we can make it more affordable fro all those working families and all those businesses who are struggling to pay their premiums right now. The second group who health reform is really going to help is small business. Right now if you’re self-employed and you own your own business, you pay more and you get less from the health insurance industry than just about anybody else. This is because you’re an individual trying to buy insurance. You don’t have the purchasing power that a large company might have. And so by moving forward on health reform we’re able to help small business owners and their employees to access the affordable insurance they need and should have just like everyone else so that they can continue to grow and be part of our economy.

What is at stake if congress is unable to pass health insurance reform?

The state of our economy is really the main concern. There’s in health reform something that Center for American Progress has talked a lot about and it’s the cost of doing nothing the cost of staying on the path that we’re on today is so high we just have to find alternatives. We have a situation today where over the past five years health insurance premiums for many people have doubled. We have a situation where if we stay on the same path, more and more of our GNP will be gong towards health insurance payments and health care as opposed to being able to grow our economy, as opposed to being able to spend more money on education. If we stay on the path that we’re on we’re going to be less and less competitive internationally because our businesses are burdened by these health care costs in a way that other businesses around the world simply aren’t. So if we want to fix the economy and get into a better situation, and if we want to find a way to deliver care to everyone here in the United States who needs that care then we have to find a way to have Congress pass health reform.