As a universal healthcare plan is a major issue of the upcoming presidential election, the School of Management and Labor Relations invited Congressman Rush Holt and University affiliates to discuss potential policies at a panel discussion Monday in the Janice H. Levin Building on Livingston campus.
"I predict we will have a major overhaul of healthcare in the federal government, probably not in the next two years but in the next half dozen years," Holt said.
Holt said he thinks fast change is possible, as businesses are finding benefits to providing better healthcare for their employees.
"Some of you have said that having a healthcare system that depends on where you work is a crazy system," he said. "Now the employers are saying that. Businesses have a bigger megaphone than the ordinary citizen."
Panelist David Mechanic, the director of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research, spoke about the politics behind the future of healthcare.
"We have to think about how to develop an agency within the federal structure with non-biased evaluations on effectiveness," Mechanic said.
He said healthcare-focused agencies in the past usually had problems progressing because they were not insulated from corporate pressures.
"The English have a model called NICE, National Institute for Health & Clinical Excellence, that does evaluations and provides advice," Mechanic said.
Voicing her opposition to federal involvement, panelist Sara Horowitz, the executive director of the Freelancers' Union, spoke about the importance of non-governmental health assistance.
"We need to start thinking about the intermediary," Horowitz said.
Her union acts as a benefits network by providing health insurance for all of its 17,000 members as a safety net for persons without a specific employer, she said.
Horowitz said the union is interested in its membership rather than profits because the more clients the group has, the more political power it assumes.
Holt described a similar situation in certain retirement communities where elderly groups residing in the same apartment buildings or group of homes gain healthcare.
Groups can provide services without moving the elderly to nursing homes.
Horowitz argued the funding for the continuation of this project should come from the federal government but be distributed by intermediary sources.
David Finegold, the dean of the School of Management and Labor Relations, brought up issues such as the outsourcing of healthcare.
"They will not take your blood at the office anymore," he said. "You have to drive somewhere else. We have a model that has totally disregarded the patient."
Finegold also talked about the benefits of choice, lower cost and better quality among the United States' global healthcare competitors.
"It's much cheaper for things like a colonoscopy in the Philippines or Canada than the U.S.," Finegold said.
He also mentioned the importance of new health technologies in the global market, such as the decoding of the human genome.
"Children born somewhere about 2012 or 2014 can get their genome decoded for about $1,000," Finegold said.
He said he thinks health insurance companies should incorporate these important procedures in their coverage.
