I'm the Guy Who Cut Your Health Benefits. Trust Me.

[StarfarerBill]

By Richard (RJ) Eskow, Consultant, Writer, Health Analyst

Over twenty years ago I sat in the office of one of the most famous CEOs in the world. He had gathered a group together to redesign the health benefits for 100,000 employees. A lot of ideas were being thrown around: cafeteria plans, increased out-of-pocket costs offset by savings accounts, multiple plan options. He was famous for both his brilliance and his nastiness, which may be why I was the only one who asked exactly what he was trying to accomplish.

"Simple," he said. "I want to give them less and make them think it's more."

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/im-the-guy-who-cut-your-h_b_410999.html

[varelse]

1. Kicking for later reading (nt)

[ThomCat]

2. So this guy, who knows the industry from the inside, confirms

that monitoring and oversight of the insurance industry is whoa-fully lacking, and industry has a lot of very obvious ways of defeating the minimal efforts at reform that are being proposed. :(

And, many of our politicians are gaming the discussion so that it only appears as if they are trying to give us reform. But they are really trying to give us less while making it look like more.

This is one more confirmation, yet again, that we know this health care debate is benefiting the insurance industry and giving us garbage. So why do so many people have so much blind faith in politicians they know are corrupt, and why do they assume that some kind of beautiful, benevolent product is coming out of this corrupt mess?

I really don't understand why so many people are supporting this, or being complacent, instead of protesting and fighting.

[ihavenobias]

6. Did you see RJ's recent interview (video) on healthcare?

Cenk had an excellent interview with RJ Eskow in which .

[slipslidingaway]

3. knr - A few more snips ...

"...Those ideas didn't work then, and there's no reason to believe they'll work now. Then, as now, people had far too much faith that we could design a health plan so efficient that it would, in effect, manage itself and reduce its own costs. Instead, here's what really happened in the 1980s: HMOs and other managed care techniques created a sharp, one-time reduction in costs (much of which wasn't really reduction at all, but a shifting of those costs from insurers to individuals). But the pace of health care inflation continued as before - sometimes slowing, sometimes increasing, but always racing far beyond what we could afford. We thought we were improving the system, but in many cases we were only adding to the problem.

...Then there's the "to catch a thief" principle: If you don't know how insurance companies can work around regulatory obstacles, you have no idea how fragile or even counterproductive some ideas can be. Take the Senate proposal to hold insurance company profits to 15 cents on every dollar collected. It sounds great, but as I told David Dayen of Firedoglake , it wasn't hard to come up with five ways the insurance companies could get around it.

These aren't abstract or ideological concerns. They're based on real-world experience. If Congressional leaders and the White House leadership are serious about creating effective reform, they need to pay more attention to how some of these proposals will play out in the rough-and-tumble arena of medical economics. They'll need to fix what's wrong in these bills, and then turn their attention to an area we've haven't discussed enough: oversight and monitoring of the health insurance industry..."

[varelse]

4. Finally got round to reading this

looks like it didn't get a lot of attention, which is a shame because this is a perspective we have not seen often in the health care insurance reform discussion.

"confessions of a health care hit man"

[varelse]

5. Wow, this guy can write

A Horror-Move Decade (With a Horror-Twist Ending)