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Politics : The Citizens Manifesto -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (10)	6/11/2005 2:54:19 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 492

How do you legislate to encourage the flattening of the compensation curve? Part of it is cultural. The USA has the superstar cult. The ratio between corp officer pay & average worker pay in Japanese companies is (used to be??) much lower than the USA. Another problem is there are not good metrics for actually quantifying the effects of a job on the company performance. We tend to credit & blame CEO's for a companies performance, but that is far from clear. Increasing health care volume would normally lower average cost. The fundamental problem I see is that health care is paid via an insurance loop, coupled with the fact of risk. Imagine if we decided that transportation was a "right" for the middle class. Make it a party plank. Next we could legislate that companies must include "transportation insurance" in employee pay. Further we could regulate the insurance companies to prevent them discriminating on "preexisting conditions" such as the age and condition of ones current transportation equipment. Under this program, when the car needs replacing, you head to the local autodealer, select your new vehicle, and the autodealer bills the insurance company. Clearly you as a consumer of transportation services don't want a shoddy vehicle, so what will you select? What happens to the cumulative money spent on vehicles under this program compared to the consumer examining his bank account before selecting a vehicle? It's this dynamic of payment that I see as the fundamental healthcare cost issue. One simple piece of legislation would do wonders for the healthcare field. Require a printed cost estimate to the client prior to any service, just like some states require of automechanics.