We often overlook businesses when we think about the problems in American healthcare and how we can fix the issues that plague our system. But about half of all American’s receive their health insurance as a benefit provided by their employer. Businesses purchase and provide health insurance for millions of Americans, and must think about employers and the plans they offer when we think about the problems in the American healthcare system.
Everyone will tell you that healthcare is complicated. We know that insurance is hard, getting to a doctor can be hard, understanding what you have to pay is hard, and trying to guess what kind of plan you need for the next year is hard. All of this makes the solutions to our healthcare problems hard, but for a majority of Americans, the person who is shaping the structure in which they will make these decisions and figure out what is available to them is someone at their job. And for a lot of those Americans, the person at their job is probably in HR, and their main goal is not to find a great healthcare solution for the employees, but to just not get yelled at by the CEO for raising health insurance coverage costs and to avoid being yelled at by unhappy employees. Nevertheless, businesses can step up and play a role in making changes for the positive in the American healthcare system.
Dave Chase in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-UP Call writes, “The opioid crisis is a complicated issue over 30 years in the making. But companies have played a major role in creating and sustaining the crisis. And a vanguard of employers are realizing that they have a major role to play in solving it, and that the solutions fall well beyond what the government alone can do.”
Companies, since they control the healthcare of half of Americans, can start making real changes to the care available to people. Employers who set up their own plans can make primary care access, physical therapy, and nutrition services virtually free to their employees. By providing a greater selection of preventative services, they can improve employee well-being and reduce the likelihood that an employee will deal with chronic pain and develop an opioid addiction. This is an over-simplified example of what companies can do, but it is important that we realize that the employer is a major player in the fight to improve the American healthcare system, and if we don’t step up to demand better from our employers, we won’t see the changes we want.
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