In this April 29, 2009 photo, Danielle Marks smiles as her husband, Tad, drains boiling water from noodles while the two prepare dinner for themselves and their two children in their Plymouth, Mass., home. The couple pay just $78 a month for required state-subsidized health insurance that covers doctor visits, prescriptions and hospital stays. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
At a press conference Thursday in Washington, D.C., Williams said his industry “fundamentally believes” it can achieve universal coverage without intrusion from the federal government.
“We fundamentally believe that we can guarantee everyone coverage,” said Williams. “We think that the system we need to build on is the employer-based system which covers well over 177 million people.”
Williams added that any innovation needs to come in the form of a public-private partnership resembling the Medicare Part-D program established by the Bush administration.
“Generally, we much prefer public-private partnerships, focusing on how we get everyone covered in a non-partisan way,” he said.
“One model I would point to is really the Part-D drug program for seniors, which I think is a very good example of a public-private partnership where individual seniors who have the resources buy their own Part-D drug benefit and those who don’t receive some sort of assistance,” said Williams.
Williams, whose company is one of the country’s largest health care providers, said that people should buy insurance if they can afford it and that government should subsidize those who cannot as a way to ensure that everyone has health insurance.
“The fundamental question [of universal coverage] comes back to, ‘If your employer’s providing it and you can afford it, and you make $100,000 a year and you’re fortunate – you should buy insurance. If you don’t have the resources, you need there need to be subsidies,” he said.
Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, which had sponsored the press conference, said that a public plan was only one of the many options available to Congress as it forges a health care reform bill.
“A public plan option is one place where you might be able to get coverage, including coverage in the private sector,” said Pollack.
The real issue, he said, was not whether the government should run an insurance plan, but whether the uninsured would have the wherewithal to take advantage of it -- a chronic problem for other government-run programs like food stamps and Medicaid.
“The real issue about the uninsured is will they have the wherewithal to get coverage whether it’s in a safety-net program, whether it’s in a private plan, or a public plan,” said Pollack.
Williams, speaking to reporters after the conference, said that a federal health insurance mandate was necessary to make any reform work, pointing out that without such a mandate, people would get insurance only when they were sick and drop it when they were well, driving the cost of coverage even further out of reach.
“What you’re going to have is someone who can buy insurance, pay a premium, have the medical procedure done, and then drop the insurance,” said Williams. “It would make insurance so unaffordable that we would not have a sustainable system. So, everyone has to be in to really neutralize the costs and make it affordable.”
“We believe everyone should be in the system,” he said.
Williams said that taxes on employer-provided care were not the way to pay for that system, but rather the country needed to recognize its moral obligation and not tax health care providers to pay for providing healt hcare.
“You don’t tax the supermarkets to feed the hungry,” said Williams. “We recognize we have social and moral obligations and we look for broad-based ways to finance what we think are important obligations that we have as a society.”
Whether those “broad-based” options included federal tax increases Williams did not say, answering only that he was no tax expert.
“I’m no expert on taxes,” he said. “What I’m focusing on are really the very specific, fundamental steps we need to do to make the system work better. I believe we need a system where every payer contributes their fair share.”