In 2001, the Seattle Mariners tied the major league record for most regular season wins with 116. They did it with what manager Lou Pinella called “small ball.”
Lou’s strategy was to get fleet-footed runners like Ichiro on base and advance them with successive base hits. Forget about swinging for the fences trying to hit home runs only to strike out; put the ball in play and score lots of runs.
American baseball is the envy of the world, and so is our health care. We just need to figure out a better way to pay for it. However, too often, elected officials try to “swing for the fences” by proposing radical changes when we would be better served by a series of base hits to fix our problems. These smaller targeted changes add up to real, sustainable reform.
For example, some state lawmakers want to modify health care plans offered by associations to small businesses. Their proposals would increase the costs of those plans, making it harder for our state’s smallest employers – those with an average of just five employees — to provide health care benefits.
In 1995, Gov. Mike Lowry (D) and a bipartisan majority of legislators approved association health plans or AHPs to help small business owners provide affordable health care coverage. Lowry’s goal was to cut the number of uninsured people.
It worked. Today, more than 500,000 employees in Washington have health care coverage through association health care plans, and some 40 percent of those people did not have health insurance previously.
Nearly 15 years later, AHPs continue to be a stunning success. According to the Office of the Insurance Commissioner, enrollment in AHPs has grown 112 percent since 2004. Overall member satisfaction with AHP coverage is high, with many of the state’s largest AHPs reporting that 85 to 92 percent of their members renew their coverage.
So if AHPs are “base hits,” why would lawmakers gut something that’s a proven success?
Small businesses create the majority of jobs, and those businesses on Main Street USA will drive our economic recovery. Lawmakers shouldn’t make matters worse by making health care coverage more expensive.
The “base hit” strategy is also beginning to work for Medicare. Currently, Medicare is neither cost-effective nor sustainable. That is a major problem, because state and federal governments are the largest purchasers of health care – and they also have the purchasing power to drive change.
The Everett Clinic is one of 10 medical groups across the country participating in a Medicare demonstration project designed to identify and test new approaches for improving care for seniors while reducing costs. It focuses on coordinated care, electronic record keeping, and disease prevention and management as ways to improve seniors’ health while saving taxpayers money.
As a result, last year the clinic saved Medicare nearly $1.6 million. In all, the 10 participating physician groups last year saved Medicare $17.4 million, according to The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
The Everett Clinic, which employs some 300 doctors in Snohomish County and cares for 25,000 Medicare patients, surpassed 25 of the 27 government quality standards. It scored an overall 96 percent for treating Medicare patients with diabetes, heart disease and congestive heart failure in accord with the scientifically proven most effective ways to treat these conditions.
This proves that it is possible to slow rising health care costs while providing quality care.
The good news is that health care can be improved without a radical overhaul. In other words, the “small ball” strategy works with both small programs such as association health plans and mammoth programs such as Medicare.
In a day when our state and federal governments are bleeding red ink and when Washington lawmakers are staring at a 20 percent revenue shortfall, why mess with success? Why risk increasing the costs of health care for employers struggling to keep people on the payroll? Why add to the taxpayers’ burden by forcing more people onto government health care?
