Dr. Lynn Blewett
speaker
80 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2024
last heard May 2024
Dr. Lynn Blewett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We're going to move it to the public domain. And then we have to raise the taxes. So the employer's maybe, you know, they in Vermont, it was like a 40% increase in employer taxes, because that's how much they contribute. And they get, you know, benefit from contributing to health insurance.
So my, you know, my bottom line is, I don't want to lose that private sector contribution to our health care coverage, which is right now provided through employers. And in some ways, You know, it's not an economist speaking now, but I don't care if it's implicit.
You know, sometimes we have to hide the taxes because we, you know, that is our foundation of our healthcare system is our employer-based healthcare. And it makes it complex and it's all, you know, I can hardly... describe the tax subsidy that they get, but it's really important that the private sector contribute to the cost of the system.
And if we move it into a public domain, then it becomes a political issue and very explicit. And that's, the economists wanna reduce that tax deduction that the employers get to make it explicit, but, um, but then we have to pay for it and we have to vote on paying for it. And so, um, so I guess that's a long winded way of saying I'm supporting universal coverage.
I don't want to lose the employer contribution to our health insurance coverage. And is there a way to get there, um, by, by sustaining that and, um, One answer is Germany. That's how Germany and maybe Austria supports their health insurance is by having employer mandate. Employers have to provide insurance. And then the government subsidizes the low income and people who are not working.
So I think there's a way to get there. There's lots of different models. But I think for our country, you know, it's going to have to be, I don't know, a I don't know what, like a huge, a huge, I don't know what the word is, transformation or a huge shift or a huge outcry. Like it's time. And there are different parts, you know, there have been different moments, like maybe this is it.
When there was a time when employers were like, we don't want to pay for healthcare. We don't understand it. It's too costly. The costs keep going up. And if employers start to sort of,
bang the drum and you know other people advocates who have been there all the time you know there may be a point where we get some some movement and some outcry like this is and it feels like after COVID and now things are costs are still going up and you know so maybe I don't know
At the end of my career, I'm thinking, probably not in my... I tell my students, maybe not in my lifetime, but hopefully in your lifetime.
Well, you know, we... We leverage all the federal survey. There's about five or six federal surveys that provide information on health insurance coverage. And of course, they measure it all different ways and have different purposes. But we leverage that for mostly for state health policy, because at the federal level, and especially now, Congress, I mean, they don't do anything.
So states are really where a lot of the incremental approaches to increasing access are. And so we leverage the federal data to provide states information on health insurance coverage, access to care. We do a lot in social determinants of health. And provide that in a easy, accessible way for people to understand sort of what do we know about our systems of care.
And so we have a nice, and maybe I'll include that after we're done, you can put it on your resource lists, what we call state health compare, it's a state It's a dashboard that you can look at different measures and compare across states or compare to the national average or get a map. And a lot of researchers use our data.
A lot of state policy people use our data to provide information to policymakers and decision makers. So our kind of motto is we want to inform decisions and discussion. And to do that, provide the best data available and try to be a new, even though I'm an advocate for universal coverage, I try to be an advocate for objective data, good data, reliable data. And that's what we've been known.
We have a good reputation for that, that people can trust our data to be unbiased and the best available on this topic.
You know, that's a really good question and probably something that the university and my center has done less well. We're really engaged with states and state decision makers and people who run the Medicaid programs. On a community basis, we have done some work with the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation to provide... county level information on insurance and coverage.
And then they've used that with community health workers and navigators. But like when they're in a certain area, they know where the uninsured are and what they look like, what their characteristics are. But, you know, we could certainly do a better job of reaching out to more community groups.
And I take that as a good reminder as I'm working my way towards retirement, that that's something we could do better at.
Yeah. So... You know, our capitalistic system that we have in the U.S. is also a foundation of our healthcare system. And part of that is having choice of provider, choice of health insurer, and then having consumers making informed decisions, and then having that market open up every year. And so health plans and providers compete for members.
So that's part of our, you know, our strategy is to have a private, private public hybrid with some elements of competition rolled in. So that open enrollment allows for that competition. And then as an employer, you know, we have bids and the plans come like they compete to have the university's business. And so that's opened up.
We have a contract for maybe three to five years and that's opened up every three to five years. But yes, it's a very, and in Medicare, things are changing a lot because of the managed care plans. And so you have to be,
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