Episode 13- Part 2 of 2 Year End Review

Richard recaps his four-part Health Care fix and sums up the purpose of the Common Bridge as we bring this year and decade to an end.

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Speaker 1 0:04

[inaudible] .

Speaker 2 0:05

Welcome to the podcast, the common bridge with Richard helpy . Rich is a successful entrepreneur in the technology, health and finance space. He and his wife, Leslie, are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors, but with a primary focus on medically and educationally underserved children. My name is Brian Kruger . And from time to time I'll be the moderator and host of this podcast. So welcome back to the common bridge on this new year's Eve , uh , ready to embark on a new decade, say goodbye to the teens, a decade of division. And , uh , an unfortunate rise in polarization and political extremes , um, seem to have thrown out reason and compromise and replace it all with anger and a whole lot of venom. But , um, this has been a really exciting project for rich and it's gone way beyond what we expected this quickly in the process. So like last week, rich isn't in the studio and this is the second , uh, of a two part urine review for the common bridge. And in this first segment, rich talks about a simple, four-part solution or a healthcare crisis. And , um , like most of rich help is policy analysis. He has some pretty simple, straightforward solutions that might not thrill the polar extremes, but it makes pretty good sense for the rest of us striving for that common bridge that connects us and doesn't divide us. So here's rich health . He talking about his healthcare solution.

Speaker 3 1:28

I think the right way to do this though is to face the fact that we've tried to put a patch on a patch, on a patch, on a patch, on a patch, and there's a comes a time when you have to just look at the structurally. So what I would propose is just a few things would solve the whole problem. Firstly, for all of the wonderful tax supported healthcare that we have, Medicare, Medicaid, chip, tri care, even the VA consolidate all those bureaucracies and all that spend into one universal system. Everybody gets that. If you're a citizen of the United States, you get it. Everybody gets that plan, it's paid for. Everybody pays something. And perhaps someone at the bottom of the income scale pays $50 a year and maybe someone at the top pays $25,000 a year. You put it right onto the 10 40 and you, that's how you raise the money for it and you consolidate all those bureaucracies all by the way, whom will defend themselves and get it down to one single spend . That's one layer. Now everybody's got something. Next. You allow a private insurance market with the appropriate controls about shall issue and not denying on preexisting conditions or on a genetic for people that want to buy faster access, that want to buy more choice, that want to buy more innovation. Isn't that that component sort of exist today? Yes. I mean you could walk out and go, look, I've got a big bag of money and I'm going to go somewhere and go like I'm going to pay for really good health insurance. There's lots of ways to do that. And if you look at every centralized system around the world, there is a secondary market and everybody that has the resources buy something on the secondary market and they do that to avoid wait times. They do that so they can get more advanced care. Of course, it'll always happen, right? It is. And, and people like to point to Canada and frankly, Canada system works well because they have the United States next door as their secondary insurance. And all of my, I had many thousands of hospital clients and all of them on the border. And in the Sunbelt, we're all set up to take in Canadian patients who had insurance if they didn't want to wait the months for their knee surgery or their hip surgery or their heart surgery, they came to the United States.

Speaker 2 4:09

Okay. So I'm going to pop in here again, this, this podcast was from last August and we're going over , um, Rich's four point plan to , uh , fix , uh , the healthcare insurance program. So just to recap, his first one was we consolidate , uh, existing programs like Medicare, Medicaid, chip, Tri-Care, things like that. And then secondly, he's saying that let the market provide , uh, solutions and programs for folks who want faster access, better access, more , uh , choice and more innovation and such. So , uh, we'll , uh, send you back to rich now back in August of , uh , the common bridge.

Speaker 3 4:48

So that's the second layer you have that, that, and let the market innovate. I mean, if somebody points to a podcast or a device that the central government invented to let us have conversations like this, then great, but look, where are the innovations come from? They come from the private sector , uh , solving something yet distribution is not great. Right ? And you can't, and I'm , uh , I'm of the belief that , um, we have all the resources in the country to provide some level of care. And that's where that , that first Lake comes from. The third thing I would do if , uh, if I, if it was possible tomorrow, I'd make everybody eligible for Medicare part D Medicare part D covers drugs. Um , it's a fair fight. It pits the insurance companies against the pharmaceutical companies that there's no copay with D Oh there's copay, there's , but you pick, you pick , um, the Medicare part D is a been a stunning success. I'm 95% subscriber satisfaction still. Uh, it is running 40% below the cost projections. And how did they get there? They made it insurance. If a person or when a person becomes eligible for Medicare, you don't have to sign up for part D, but if you wait until you now have drug needs, the ketchup premium is really steep. So it attracts in the 80% of the people that are only going to use 20% of the services and provides enough funding for the 20% that are going to use 80% of the spend . And by the way, this isn't an idea that was invented in the good old USA. The Australia national system uses something very, very similar and it works really well. How long do you think that's been going on in Australia? I'm not familiar with that . I don't know how long Australia's had that, but I've worked out the kinks yet. I mean, they're all aware. We start paying him when you're 19. Really? Yeah . And you don't have to, but if you wait till you're 28, it's a lot of money to get in. So it's, it's true insurance. Um, and then the fourth leg that I'd put on this would be a very simple tax. The benefits, all right ? If you're , remember the origins, the origins was, I can't give you wages, so I'm going to give you this health insurance. It has monetary value. I guarantee you give somebody on their W2 they made $45,000 a year in wages and they made $25,000 a year in health insurance benefits. Now they're going to start paying attention to utilization. They're going to start paying attention to what's in that plan. They're going to work to bring the costs down. And you could phase that in over five years. And before you ask, I'll tell you if there's all of those four things that I outlined, what would be the key, the catalyst to actually get us on the right course? The key would be start taxing the benefits. You could do that, phase it in 20% a year over the next five years. You think that gets, that gets somebody's attention. It , it starts to put the economics down into the very powerful free enterprise engine that we have and it lets consumers make choices and creates the moral hazard of consumption. Um, uh , prior to , um , utilizing services. Now I want to make sure before I leave that topic though, that there's two sides of the coin about utilization. So the tools of copayments and deductibles were used to pro somewhat prevent the capricious use of health services. And it does work and , and healthcare utilization does come down, but they've also found that it comes down inappropriately. People don't get the needed because they don't want to have to pay the deductible or don't want to have to pay the copay. I see. And so that, that is a , um , a real hazard. Yeah , but it comes a block. Yeah . But if you get , if you start taxing somebody for that $25,000 plan, you're not saying you can't have it. You're just saying it's compensation, you're going to pay taxes on that. We'd really get this looked at.

Speaker 2 9:19

So there you have it in four easy steps and , uh , and I'm not being flippant about that. When you sit in the room with Richard helpy , uh, he gets you to believe that really quick and it makes sense. It's really cool. So, you know, he says, consolidate the current programs , uh, you know, and then let the private market , uh, provide for the spaces in between for better access, faster access. Uh, and then the third stage was to make everybody eligible for , for Medicare part D and then the fourth stage, which I thought was the most , uh , interesting of that bunch as you tax that benefit. Um, and it does a couple of things, gets people, but most of all it gets people interested in paying attention to what they're doing with their own healthcare that take ownership of it. So that's great. So finally, and I think it's an app way to end this , um, uh, this recap this two part recap of the common bridge. Um, early on in this series, it was in the first episode. Rich does a really great , uh, summary of why he did this in the first place and what this podcast will be all about moving forward. So we're going to end up with that and , um , say just happy new year and in a promising new decade for everyone from everybody here , uh, at the , uh, production studios of the common bridge.

Speaker 3 10:36

And so w w what I think about on this podcast and what I think about what to do with the remaining time I have on earth, I like to think of the analogy of a bridge. So imagine a bridge spanning a chasm and you've got a support on let's say the right bank and it's a very strong support and it's people are working really hard to build that. And on the left bank, somebody is working really hard. Other people are too . They're going to try to build that left bank just as big and as strong as they can. And now that span goes out across the chasm. They both collapse in the middle. Nobody gets across that chasm. There has to be reaching out from the right, left from the left to the right with a big old support in the middle. And that's where it is . Is it your thought that there's a stream out there that's not, that doesn't have a voice right now. I'm hearing from you that it's there. There's, there's some people like you out there, but it's not on either extreme that you're hearing about that's getting that attention. It first of all, I'd make terrible theater. It'd make terrible sound bites and it would make a terrible fodder for the national hysteria that the legacy media and the primary cable so-called news networks like to put on every night. So, so let me, let me kind of run through this then to the end. All right , I'm going to try to be a bro . I might get my brains beat out on this, but I'm going to try. We're going to try to be original. There's plenty of places for extremist to go. Okay. And if you've heard it on 10 other places, not going to hear it here because if you want to hear the far right, the far left, you all know where you can go everywhere . It's everywhere. You can go get that. We have solvable problems. And so we're going to try to be solutions oriented. We're not going to give into dogma. We're not going to give into partisanship. We'll call out stupidity no matter where it comes from. Um, that's an open market on certain places. And the preferred delivery method will be sarcasm just because I'm very well practiced at that. Um, we will bring in interesting guests. Um, we will step off of hype and we will find out. We'll find out if there's more that unites us than divides us. Sounds like you're not looking for a winner or loser. You're looking to move forward. That's a great way to put it. And you know, if we can find a solution, there's solution to immigration, there's a solution to guns, there's solutions to healthcare, and you have to be able to sit down with people. And , and sometimes when I talk about some of these solutions, people will look at me and they'll go, yeah, you know, that's a really good idea. And then, but, and then they'll start criticizing. If they're a Democrat, they'll start railing on the Republicans. If they're a Republican, they'll start railing on the Democrats. And can we just stop and say it's an idea and maybe tell the people that we elected who worked for us. We don't care about your party affiliation, we don't care if you have a D and R and I a w, a P, whatever, next to your name, fix the problem. It's there . Solvable problems. We can compromise. Not everybody's going to get their own way. But this notion that we're going to go from one extreme to the other and, and, and then, and then be surprised that we have this national anxiety, you know , in this face of this really robust economy. And if you looked at the , um, uh , statistics that came out this week about how the income household incomes are up and wages are up and it should be happy days are here again, but instead we have others statistics that show that we've got a lot of social ills and we need to calm down, back away from the partisan brinksmanship. And let's talk about

Speaker 2 14:52

what ails us and how to solve. You have been listening to Richard healthy's common bridge podcast recording and postproduction provided by stunt three multimedia. All rights are reserved by Richard helpy . For more information, visit Richard helpy.com .