The CEO of Whole Foods has a plan to reform health care. Not by increasing communist-style government control of healthcare OMGWTFBBQ, but instead by taking simple, common sense steps. Mainly, having every retailer on Earth become Whole Foods.
While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment.
This sounds like common sense speaking, and if there’s nothing that never made me pants-shittingly annoyed, it’s people sharing common sense with me!
Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees’ Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.
Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan’s costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.
This seems like a great, common sense reform. High deductible health insurance with a significant contribution towards the deductible. I mean, if you ignore the fact that high deductible insurance often doesn’t cover common conditions like pregnancy, have incredibly strict in-network requirements, high coinsurance rates even after deductibles are paid which far outstrip an $1800-a-year contribution, place strict limits on the allowable prices for common procedures and are tied to hour-per-week work requirements that it’s incredibly easy for companies to work around, it’s pretty much like perfect.
I’m also not aware of this reckless pack of health care spenders, wantonly running around under a $250 deductible having their feet repeatedly examined by podiatrists and getting thryoid tests done because they slept poorly last night. What it did make me more likely to do was go to the doctor before I got pneumonia (as happened this year under a high-deductible health insurance plan that didn’t cover the visit). And there was that time that my doctor found the polyps in my colon under a low-deductible plan, a visit that I likely would have delayed if I’d been earning the same amount and had to pay for a colonoscopy out of pocket. I must say, though, bleeding out of my ass and not breathing properly are small prices to play for the ineffable satisfaction of true capitalist freedom.