I am on board with your thinking Mathew, but we need to work with the outmoded bureaucracy we have in place. Health care is a local concern and would best serve the public if managed locally. Unfortunately, the fed got a hold of it and made it what we have today. We at the FHCE are simply trying to do the best we can with what we have. I like the idea of guaranteed basic plans for everyone with limited mandated coverage and high deductibles. This would make sure everyone could buy coverage who needed it and could afford it. The cost would be much lower.

In California Emergency Rooms, all children, as well as all patients, are cared for regardless of coverage. It is the financing of care we are addressing. All premium payers and tax payers absorb the cost of uncompensated care.

The call center is outsourced to a company in Fresno that answers the phones for doctors and hospitals. The FHCE bought up some of their excess capacity. We have 32 operators who are managed and trained by one call center employee dedicated to our efforts. It costs the FHCE about $14,000 per month to answer calls from all over the United States.   We have answered over 110,000 phone calls. The WellPoint Foundation donates the money necessary to run the call center to the FHCE. We only have one employee who keeps the information on the website up-to-date for the whole United States. She is paid by the FHCE. We have two other volunteers that help out the FHCE and a terrific board. We get over 100,000 people per month visiting CoverageForAll.org and have had over 2,000,000 total visitors since 2007.

Point-of-service eliminates 27,300 public sector jobs in California and saves about $3,000,000,000 per year not counting better fraud control and budgeting process.

We did not make up the rules, but the federal aid was there. When Governor Schwarzenegger eliminated all of the application assistants he was saving a small amount of money from non-government employees who were only compensated when they actually enrolled someone in the program. He kept the fixed cost of the government union contract employees. In a time of fiscal constraint, he eliminated his variable cost and kept his fixed cost. Eliminating the variable cost saved him a nominal amount of money, but cost the State $10’s of millions in Federal Aid. No one is ever held liable for these types of obvious blunders.

No.

The FHCE is a public 501c3 non-profit. See our 2010 Annual Report for a list of funders and other information about the organization.

I feel that it is nonsense to actually put the responsibility on people to sign-up for public health insurance plans because, first of all, more likely than not, the people you are asking to enroll do not know for what exactly they’re signing up. In many cases, they are the indigent and uneducated. It is hard to get these folks to go through the enrollment process. Secondly,  California’s reimbursement program is not insurance anyway. It is prepaid health care, which is hugely different than insurance. The State takes everyone with no emphasis on risk evaluation. I ask, why does the State of California have 27,300 employees whose job it is to screen those who are eligible for public assistance? And why is the average cost of each one of these employees $110,000 per year?  California could easily streamline the eligibility screening process online, replacing these employees with a point-of-service reimbursement system that pays the doctors and hospitals for services rendered. This would save the State about  $3,000,000,000 per year and implement a system that would be transparent, have automated check points for eligibility, and immediate fraud controls in the payment system. It would also make it simpler to budget the process.

Hi Mathew,

I appreciate your questions. Before I answer them, let me give you some background. I am in the health insurance business. Our company serves 16,000 small businesses in California. Early on in the health care debate, we recognized that the government health care takeover position was driven by one contention: “There are 50,000,000 uninsured in the U.S. with California having 8 million uninsured.” I decided if I could figure out what they were saying and where it was coming from I could create a good argument. We discovered that of the uninsured they are claiming in the U.S. about 1/3 are immigrants awaiting legal status, 1/3 are the Young and Invincibles, and 1/3 are eligible for public programs and not signed up. In order to prove my point, since 2004, we, at the non-profit, Foundation For Health Coverage Education, have put the entire U.S. public health insurance system online. This includes all 50 States and the District of Columbia. We have a simple 5 question Health Coverage Eligibility Quiz,  which  takes the anonymous respondents to a personalized list of public health coverage options for which they are eligible, including sign-up checklists, applications, and program contact information. There is more to it than that, but this gives you a general understanding of how we got started.

 Hi Folks, Thank you for your responses. It seems this opinion piece struck some nerves. I have been out of town on business and will reply to your comments over the next day or so. Keep your eyes, ears and minds open. It seems some of you think the piece is too liberal and others think I am for government run programs. Hopefully we can learn from each other. Phil....

Good suggestions George, but if we get specific before the election, it will give the democrats time to respond with their usual tripe. Never try to kill a person who is comitting suicide. They are getting slaughtered in the polls. Let's let them destroy themselves. Then we take action. Phil...

The repeal of Obamacare is all about November's election. If the people are as mad as they seem and they stay mad and we win enough seats it will either be repealed or unfunded.

No kidding George, if we all go on unemployment, we would have tremendous growth! This could be the answer, first let's run it by the editor at the Merc, and if he approves we will move up to Obama's folks.

Here is the problem Peter. In many cases the government is one of if not the largest customer these businesses have. So they are afraid to rock the boat when they are makigned. Take WellPoint. Sibilius and Obama both told abject lies about cancelling policies when women have breast cancer. Angela Braly spoke up and asked them to stop, but the threat of the government moving there business is too great a threat to the stockholders. Socialism breeds politicalization of private sector companies. We need to get the government out of our businesses in order to take back our freedoms.

Terrific.....

Keep up the good fight!!!! This bill is a travesty. Phil...

You are right Scott. Wait until the next note. You will not believe the information we have on medicaid directly from over 4000 uninsured emergency room patients. You will be amazed.

 Our family totally revolves around Sunday dinners, with everything home made. We had a rib BBQ cookoff two weeks ago. Costco ribs of course. There were nine variaties. I was full from judging all of the styles. I think cooking together and eating the work are about the most gratifying events we have. A couple of good bottles of wine take some of the pressure off when the meal does not come out as planned. Great times though.