Former president says health care cost hurting U.S. competitiveness
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Printable FormatCHICAGO TRIBUNE
EVANSTON, Ill. -- Former President Bill Clinton says health-care spending is dragging down the nation's competitiveness, particularly in the automotive industry.
Speaking here on Friday, Clinton said that General Motors Corp. pays an average of $1,500 per car to cover the total cost of health insurance for its employees -- more, he said, than Japanese automakers pay per car.
"The Japanese would rather pay less on health care and beat our brains out in the car competition," Clinton told about 250 people at a forum on health care sponsored by Huron Consulting Group and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
Ford Motor Co. pays an average $980 a car to provide its workers with health insurance, and DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group pays around $600 per car, he said.
Clinton said the United States has decided it's more important to let "the health-care-financing tail wag the health-care dog than it is to maintain a competitive auto industry or insure all Americans or improve the quality of health care."
Democratic Sen. Barack Obama recently introduced legislation in Congress that would help address soaring health care costs for automakers by defraying industry's costs of investment in more fuel-efficient cars.
Obama's proposal calls for the federal government to pick up a portion of the costs automakers pay for retiree health care, so long as companies use some of the savings to retool their factories.
Obama said the Big Three automakers spent $6.7 billion on retiree health care costs in 2004.
Clinton said he supports the measure and "would gladly give up my tax cut" to pay for it.
The former president discussed numerous problems contributing to runaway health-care spending, including administrative costs that eat up 34 percent of America's health-care dollars, more than any other industrialized nation.
He said health insurers and providers "play a giant game of tug-o-war" over coverage, with insurers withholding payment or denying claims for lengthy periods "to get the float on the premiums instead of paying on the policy."
"That's the money you spend as an American citizen, $300 billion a year, to pay two million people who work for health insurers on one side and health providers on the other to go to work every day to play a giant game of tug-o-war," he said.
Solving the problem will take a step-by-step approach, Clinton said, acknowledging that trying to pass sweeping health-care reform was one of the biggest failures of his presidency.
As a former president, he's had some success. Earlier this month, he helped broker a deal with beverage companies to get sugary soft drinks out of schools. The companies agreed to sell only water, unsweetened juice and low-fat and nonfat milk to elementary and middle schools. Diet sodas and sports drinks will remain in high schools.
The agreement came out of a collaboration between the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation and the American Heart Association.
"I've enjoyed working on these health care issues," Clinton said. "And yet I continue to be plagued by the fact that we tried and did not succeed in solving the problems of American health care when I was president."