One of the US largest health insurance company Aetna’s chief executive says he is open to have a debate on “single-payer” healthcare system in the US.
On Thursday Mark Bertolini Aetna’s CEO said – “Single-payer, I think we should have that debate as a nation,”
During a private meeting Bertolini faced Aetna employees question, he was asked by one the employees – “In the news media, it is reporting that the Republican health plan is paving the way to a single-payer system,” an Aetna employee asks Bertolini. “What are your thoughts on that, and how would it impact Aetna?”
This Was Bertolini’s Response:
Single-payer, I think we should have that debate as a nation. But let me remind everybody that Aetna was the first financial intermediary for Medicare. We cut the first check for Medicare in 1965 to Hartford Hospital for $517.57.
The government doesn’t administer anything. the first thing they’ve ever tried to administer in social programs was the ACA, and that didn’t go so well. So the industry has always been the back room for government. If the government wants to pay all the bills, and employers want to stop offering coverage, and we can be there in a public private partnership to do the work we do today with Medicare, and with Medicaid at every state level, we run the Medicaid programs for them, then let’s have that conversation.
But if we want to turn it all over to the government to run, is the government really the right place to run all this stuff? And that’s the debate that needs to be had. They could finance it, and if there is one financer, and you could call that single-payer. …
We’re going to pay for it one way or another. What we have to do is we have to get the costs right. We have to get people healthy. It’s not about who is paying the bill. It’s about what we’re doing to get the costs down. The Democrats are now saying that with the new Republican bill, wait there is nothing in here about getting costs down. That’s the point. And so that’s the place we’re headed as a company. It’s not just about paying the bills.
What Bertolini seems open to is a version of single-payer where the federal government would contract out certain functions private companies, such as Aetna. These insurers would, in his own words, become a “back room for government.”
T.J. Crawford Aetna spokesperson said that Bertolini was certainly not “advocating” for a single-payer system. Instead he was representing his openness to debating it. “while pointing out that public-private partnerships have been the backbone of the more successful government health care programs. In other words, partnering works when done the right way,” Crawford wrote.”
Date: May 12, 2017