The musings of a physician who served the community for over six decades
367 Topics
Downtown A discussion about downtown area in Philadelphia and connections from today with its historical past.
West of Broad A collection of articles about the area west of Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Delaware (State of) Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Religious Philadelphia William Penn wanted a colony with religious freedom. A considerable number, if not the majority, of American religious denominations were founded in this city. The main misconception about religious Philadelphia is that it is Quaker-dominated. But the broader misconception is that it is not Quaker-dominated.
Particular Sights to See:Center City Taxi drivers tell tourists that Center City is a "shining city on a hill". During the Industrial Era, the city almost urbanized out to the county line, and then retreated. Right now, the urban center is surrounded by a semi-deserted ring of former factories.
Philadelphia's Middle Urban Ring Philadelphia grew rapidly for seventy years after the Civil War, then gradually lost population. Skyscrapers drain population upwards, suburbs beckon outwards. The result: a ring around center city, mixed prosperous and dilapidated. Future in doubt.
Historical Motor Excursion North of Philadelphia The narrow waist of New Jersey was the upper border of William Penn's vast land holdings, and the outer edge of Quaker influence. In 1776-77, Lord Howe made this strip the main highway of his attempt to subjugate the Colonies.
Land Tour Around Delaware Bay Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Tourist Trips Around Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies The states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and southern New Jersey all belonged to William Penn the Quaker. He was the largest private landholder in American history. Using explicit directions, comprehensive touring of the Quaker Colonies takes seven full days. Local residents would need a couple dozen one-day trips to get up to speed.
Touring Philadelphia's Western Regions Philadelpia County had two hundred farms in 1950, but is now thickly settled in all directions. Western regions along the Schuylkill are still spread out somewhat; with many historic estates.
Up the King's High Way New Jersey has a narrow waistline, with New York harbor at one end, and Delaware Bay on the other. Traffic and history travelled the Kings Highway along this path between New York and Philadelphia.
Arch Street: from Sixth to Second When the large meeting house at Fourth and Arch was built, many Quakers moved their houses to the area. At that time, "North of Market" implied the Quaker region of town.
Up Market Street to Sixth and Walnut Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
Sixth and Walnut over to Broad and Sansom In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Montgomery and Bucks Counties The Philadelphia metropolitan region has five Pennsylvania counties, four New Jersey counties, one northern county in the state of Delaware. Here are the four Pennsylvania suburban ones.
Northern Overland Escape Path of the Philadelphia Tories 1 of 1 (16) Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
City Hall to Chestnut Hill There are lots of ways to go from City Hall to Chestnut Hill, including the train from Suburban Station, or from 11th and Market. This tour imagines your driving your car out the Ben Franklin Parkway to Kelly Drive, and then up the Wissahickon.
Philadelphia Reflections is a history of the area around Philadelphia, PA
... William Penn's Quaker Colonies
plus medicine, economics and politics ... nearly 4,000 articles in all
Philadelphia Reflections now has a companion tour book! Buy it on Amazon
Philadelphia Revelations
Try the search box to the left if you don't see what you're looking for on this page.
George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Obituary
George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Age: 97 of Philadelphia, formerly of Haddonfield
Dr. George Ross Fisher of Philadelphia died on March 9, 2023, surrounded by his loving family.
Born in 1925 in Erie, Pennsylvania, to two teachers, George and Margaret Fisher, he grew up in Pittsburgh, later attending The Lawrenceville School and Yale University (graduating early because of the war). He was very proud of the fact that he was the only person who ever graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Science in English Literature. He attended Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons where he met the love of his life, fellow medical student, and future renowned Philadelphia radiologist Mary Stuart Blakely. While dating, they entertained themselves by dressing up in evening attire and crashing fancy Manhattan weddings. They married in 1950 and were each other’s true loves, mutual admirers, and life partners until Mary Stuart passed away in 2006. A Columbia faculty member wrote of him, “This young man’s personality is way off the beaten track, and cannot be evaluated by the customary methods.”
After training at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia where he was Chief Resident in Medicine, and spending a year at the NIH, he opened a practice in Endocrinology on Spruce Street where he practiced for sixty years. He also consulted regularly for the employees of Strawbridge and Clothier as well as the Hospital for the Mentally Retarded at Stockley, Delaware. He was beloved by his patients, his guiding philosophy being the adage, “Listen to your patient – he’s telling you his diagnosis.” His patients also told him their stories which gave him an education in all things Philadelphia, the city he passionately loved and which he went on to chronicle in this online blog. Many of these blogs were adapted into a history-oriented tour book, Philadelphia Revelations: Twenty Tours of the Delaware Valley.
He was a true Renaissance Man, interested in everything and everyone, remembering everything he read or heard in complete detail, and endowed with a penetrating intellect which cut to the heart of whatever was being discussed, whether it be medicine, history, literature, economics, investments, politics, science or even lawn care for his home in Haddonfield, NJ where he and his wife raised their four children. He was an “early adopter.” Memories of his children from the 1960s include being taken to visit his colleagues working on the UNIVAC computer at Penn; the air-mail version of the London Economist on the dining room table; and his work on developing a proprietary medical office software using Fortran. His dedication to patients and to his profession extended to his many years representing Pennsylvania to the American Medical Association.
After retiring from his practice in 2003, he started his pioneering “just-in-time” Ross & Perry publishing company, which printed more than 300 new and reprint titles, ranging from Flight Manual for the SR-71 Blackbird Spy Plane (his best seller!) to Terse Verse, a collection of a hundred mostly humorous haikus. He authored four books. In 2013 at age 88, he ran as a Republican for New Jersey Assemblyman for the 6th district (he lost).
A gregarious extrovert, he loved meeting his fellow Philadelphians well into his nineties at the Shakespeare Society, the Global Interdependence Center, the College of Physicians, the Right Angle Club, the Union League, the Haddonfield 65 Club, and the Franklin Inn. He faithfully attended Quaker Meeting in Haddonfield NJ for over 60 years. Later in life he was fortunate to be joined in his life, travels, and adventures by his dear friend Dr. Janice Gordon.
He passed away peacefully, held in the Light and surrounded by his family as they sang to him and read aloud the love letters that he and his wife penned throughout their courtship. In addition to his children – George, Miriam, Margaret, and Stuart – he leaves his three children-in-law, eight grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and his younger brother, John.
A memorial service, followed by a reception, will be held at the Friends Meeting in Haddonfield New Jersey on April 1 at one in the afternoon. Memorial contributions may be sent to Haddonfield Friends Meeting, 47 Friends Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.
BIG nations gobble up small ones, so small ones band together. As George Washington observed, when you are strong the others leave you alone. But other forces sometimes make smallness seem more attractive, especially if the nation is already uniform in religion, language, and culture. Nations search for an ideal size for both War and Peace and discover they praise two incompatible sizes. Both the American Revolution of 1776 and today's struggles of the European Union fit a common formula: banding together for military security, then pulling back from declining Liberty. The American experience of a Civil War after eighty years under the Constitution suggests the margin for error is narrow. And enduring; even in the Twenty-first century, it is striking that both little Scotland and that little bit of little Belgium that is Flemish seem willing to sacrifice major economic benefits for what seems to outsiders a minor step for Liberty. But the whole point of the Constitutional Convention then seems to emerge: Nine years previously, thirteen separate sovereignties had been more or less hustled into a military alliance by the appearance of a hostile British fleet. That war was now over, the thirteen had grown accustomed to living together, but the Articles of Confederation had not foreseen a large nation clearly enough in 1776. The Articles did not even provide for an executive branch. In the chaotic conditions of 1787, a calmer choice could be made between breaking apart and unifying, for a different set of reasons based on Peace and Prosperity rather than war: Either surrender some aspects of state power to a real union or let each contentious state confront its future, unsupported. In many ways, it was the vision of Liberty which changed between times of peace and times of war. In 1860 the stakes were higher than in 1787 but the issues were mixed. Industrializing states in the northern part viewed the Union as an economic opportunity. Purely agricultural southern American states were not so sure; in the end, preferring the older set of rules, they took their leap. To the amazement of Southern leaders, the North was ready to die to preserve that Union, and so the demands of warfare reasserted themselves.
Europe
Geography doubtless imposes variable limits for both war and peaceful prosperity, anywhere. Some nations have therefore banded together for military reasons then split apart in local quarrels, more or less regularly. Thirteen American colonies had been afraid to confront Britannia alone, but somewhat overconfidently took on that challenge as a confederation. At the other extreme, little Rhode Island even refused to send delegates to the Constitutional Convention, fearing big neighbors more than remote British rule. Fortunately, similar possessiveness about local perks was unable to collect enough political power to dominate other states. After a year by the time of the state ratifying conventions, however, it was a close call. Peace and prosperity: getting bigger discourages predators, but getting smaller offers sole possession of what you have. Since the United States grew in jumps through most of its history, it probably learned intangible things from alternating episodes of being too big and then too small. Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis of the advancing frontier as a shaper of culture is not greatly different in the essence of its argument.
When ideas of Union first gained traction, both the thirteen American colonies in the Eighteenth century and the twenty-five nations of the Eurozone in the Twenty-First, were dominated by the memory of war. The American objective was the simple one of military parity with a common enemy. The nations of the European Union had a longer view; a seemingly endless cycle of bloody wars sustained their conviction that other wars would inevitably follow unless they did something innovative. National unification on the American model sounded ideal but difficult. Perhaps the habits of cooperation and trade would lead to it. The unexpected decline of the Soviet empire further reduced the fear of war. Pride may also have led to over-reaching; twenty-five is comfortably larger than thirteen, which up to that time was the largest nation merger to survive. But twenty-five is smaller and thus more manageable than the present American fifty. To begin the process with monetary union might produce quick benefits from a source too mysterious to produce much public resistance. Nobody could think of a war started by a monetary dispute.
Justice Blackmun
, Of course, the Europeans expected difficulties from speaking many languages, but they probably still underestimate how far the legal profession has already gone in confining nuanced words to a single meaning; it is essential to their trade. When many languages split off from a common stem, many unaccepted interpretations re-emerge when they are later re-combined. Even without the nuance problem, translation into many languages is a serious expense, which is at least as burdensome as currency exchanges were among multiple sovereignties. By contrast two centuries earlier, the American revolutionaries shared a single language but soon found espionage was an unusually serious problem. Even their enemy spoke English, so sometimes improved clarity itself creates unexpected problems. Indeed, in American disputes about Original Intent, we repeatedly encounter the tenacity of people believing a document says what they want it to say. Vigorous legal advocates think they are paid to marshall every argument weak or strong. Staying within the English language, the evolution of U.S. Supreme Court interpretations often turns on subtle differences in the meaning of simple words. Penumbras and emanations from the word "Privacy" in Roe v. Wade soon force our judges to decide whether abortion within a right of privacy is simply too far from a common understanding of English, in a double way. Both in the discovery of a right to privacy within a document which does not use the word, and then in the inclusion of abortion within that, Justice Blackmun clearly overestimated the capacity of excited citizens to be flexible. Much more surely, he would have overestimated public willingness to grasp his meaning in two-step translations of a foreign language. Since this famous decision is destined to stand or fall, depending on public tolerance for such wordplay, having almost every citizen confidently understanding English is at least one advantage. Parenthetically, we will need every advantage possible. The really serious box which Justice Blackmun put us in, was to invent a Constitutional mandate which thus can only be compromised in a Constitutional amendment. In almost every other conflict, the system of checks and balances permits either the Congress or the state legislatures to soften the conflict with conciliatory modification. The constitutional amendment is already difficult to achieve; inflaming the religious passions of the forty-odd bodies who must agree to amendment makes amendment nearly impossible.
Auto-de-fe
By contrast with important language confusions, "hatreds between nations" are often mentioned as an obstacle to unification but the claim seems largely bogus. Argot and slang are commonly invented to conceal the opinions of a minority group. Over thousands of years, this purpose of "jiving" a secret code among conspirators has been perfected exquisitely. It's hard to overcome, easy to teach children. But the memory of actual wars really dies out rather quickly, not least because atrocities are so hideous, mankind wants to forget them. I was seventy years old before someone told me I had ancestors burned at the stake. By whom? By someone who has also been dead for four hundred years, not likely to seem threatening to me. Over the fifty years since the Second World War, I have run into former German and Japanese soldiers; they now seem pretty benign. One American former prisoner of war was forced to stand at attention while his Japanese captor pulled out his gold teeth with pliers; he told this story with a faint smile. It is one of the benevolence of biology that we are born without memories, and a second is a biological impossibility of remembering the feeling of pain without first re-dramatizing the experience for future reference. Once actual onlookers stop grinding the grievance ax, it should be possible to get on with devising a European constitution, provided it contains a meaningful equivalent of our First Amendment.
Helen of Troy
It's an important point for a proposal unifying two dozen different priesthoods and a number of nations wholly defined by a single religion. A workable constitution for them must contain a strict separation of church and state, because ballads, epic poems, and traditions are synthetic, quite different from actual experiences. Helen of Troy may or may not have had a face that launched a thousand ships, but Homer's Iliad certainly glorified more hatred than she did; who can say whether the poem portrays the truth? That's the war side of things; the Odyssey is powerful in evoking the special virtues leading to prosperous nationhood. Because you can't argue or reason with epic myth, it is the many exaggerated glorifications and exaggerated condemnations by them which supply endurance to patriotic myths, easily reducing macroeconomists of the European Central Bank to tears of frustration. Because the best of these epics stand alone as powerful literature, their propaganda strength is all the more difficult to deconstruct with mere logic. Quoting Arnold Toynbee, it is not weaknesses, but overextension of their finest qualities, which usually brings nations down.
Euro Zone
While true grievances seldom pose obstacles of their own, they do often misdirect political leadership from what is best for their countries. European Unification had a primary goal of eliminating future wars, but its leaders decided the peace goal was achievable only by indirection and began first with monetary tools for prosperity. That takes a long time; America was still fumbling monetarily until the end of the Civil War. So while starting with small victories seems a plausible route to big victories, in fact, it drains much of the idealism out of revolutions by avoiding the cataclysmic issues which justify great sacrifices. Even worse, it here made the financial disaster of the Euro symbolic of tawdry hazards on the road to Prosperity, raising issues of corruption and self-advancement, rather than idealistic sacrifice. At least when you struggle for national security, every day you survive is another victory. There is, of course, no room in past struggles for Americans to gloat over their superior approach to permanent Union. But a defeat is a defeat, and the Euro mess could become a big defeat.
Congressman Ron Paul
From a commentator's perspective, currency matters are difficult to understand and explain. For contrast, the Battle of Normandy is thrilling and awe-inspiring; every death is the death of a hero. But rises in productivity and the risk implications of volatility, seem hopelessly confusing to an economics beginner. Worse still, there exists real uncertainty among experts. We now have a currency which has no backing in precious metals and is really just a book entry. That's useful for transactions, less certainly useful for a storehouse of value. Mr. Ron Paul ran for President of the United States challenging the whole Federal Reserve concept, and a possibility must be admitted that his speeches have a grain of truth. We trust our bankers to devise a workable system of exchange without gold and silver, and readily admit that Mr. Bernanke knows more about it than we do. But. But the world economy nearly collapsed utterly a few years ago, and you know, Dr. Ron Paul might just have a valid point or two. Europe has not yet emerged into a fit environment for enjoying a monetary Crusade to a World Without War. For a striking contrast, just go to any Civil War movie. And watch those teenaged soldier boys charge up the hill, ready to die for the Union.
REFERENCES
A Study of History Arnold J. Toynbee ISBN-13: 978-0195050806
So much for expecting foreigners to help us. They remain grateful to America for winning World War II, but that was seventy years ago. Forget about reserve currencies, a declining surplus of gold bars, the Marshall Plan, Truman Plan, and all that. After seventy years of thanking us, foreigners quite rightly expect us to pay for our own health care without monetary subsidies from them. Or protectionist trade policies, either.
To begin with healthcare basics, lifetime medical costs over the past century have progressively migrated toward the end of life, and the end of life has itself moved later. Lifetime earnings remain concentrated near the middle of life, so a gap widens. Collectively, the population accumulates wealth during its working years, spending its savings for healthcare after it retires. If lifetime health costs could be pre-paid and funneled into savings, with the savings professionally invested, a large proportion of medical costs might be paid out of investment income. It could be called the difference between pre-payment, and insurance, except whole life insurance, employs the same principle. Considerably expanded, this insight could markedly reduce the cost of healthcare, making it more affordable without changing it. Because medical care is undisrupted, the hidden cost of disrupting it might vanish, too. It creates what the Japanese call a virtuous cycle. (It wouldn't hurt to read this last paragraph a second time.)
If lifetime health costs could be pre-paid and funneled into savings, with the savings professionally invested, a large proportion of medical costs might be paid out of investment income.
The average American healthcare costs we are discussing are in the neighborhood of $10,000 a year, surely somewhat less for younger peopleFootnote . They are about double that for the last year of life, somewhat less than that for the first year of life. Medicare is about 50% paid for by subscribers, 50% subsidized by additions to the national debt. Ignoring inflation and tax effects, the net average real lifetime health cost at such rates would be at most $800,000, of which $400,000 would be additions to the national debt. Remember, projecting healthcare costs seventy years in advance is a very hazy business. We certainly hope these projections prove to be a gross over-estimate, but to remain on the safe side the proposal here is to make a lifetime investment to cover only the first and last years of life because the heavy costs of birth and death affect 100% of the population. The projected cost of these two benefits would be $30,000, from which $15,000 could possibly be subtracted as the national debt, or else subtracted as double-counting the cost-shifted expenses of indigents. Meanwhile, removal of the first-and-last year costs would reduce annual costs by about 4%, or $30,000 lifetime. So it seems safe to start with a $ 15,000-lifetime goal, which could be achieved by investing $8 at birth at 7% tax-free return. That's right, eight bucks. Different assumptions produce different answers; the only purpose of the example is to demonstrate easy feasibility of the approach. Multiply the initial contribution by five or ten times, and you reach the same conclusion.
Scientific advances during the last century greatly changed the shape of two curves, of lifetime income and lifetime medical expenses; future advances will surely do the same. The life expectancy of Americans roughly lengthened by thirty years and continues to increase. The logic of compound interest demands that money at 7% will double in ten years; the longer you live, the more times it will double; that's pretty old stuff. What is new and unique is the way adding three extra doublings helps the virtuous cycle, maybe changes it significantly, because 2,4,8,16,32 keeps getting a lot bigger at the far end. Three more doublings make the difference between 32 and 256, and that's a drastic difference.
But, whoa, on the other hand, the longer you keep money in a bank, the more opportunity there is for financial crashes, inflation, "moral hazard", mismanagement, changes in political philosophy, wars and a thousand other things. Eighty years is a long time from now; who says the money will be there when you need it? And even if all the 19th Century nightmares are merely pipe dreams, an awful lot of Americans remain mistrustful of financial institutions. Presidents Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren and an equal number of nearly-successful candidates for president were even in favor of abolishing banks. A large and possibly growing number of Americans distrust the Federal Reserve, and with some reason. After all, a dollar in 1913 when the Federal Reserve was founded, is now worth a penny. Pause for a moment, reader. You have now heard both sides of the argument, the opportunity and the risk. Everything from here on details. At some point in the next century, investing a few dollars at birth will generate enough income to pay for both being born and dying, the two medical conditions which are 100% certain. It might even generate enough to pay for lifetime medical care, and more, but that isn't the point. What matters is for us to have the wit, and the courage, to take advantage of something which sort of crept up on us.
Footnote The data used here are rounded-off and approximated 2011 data obtained from HHS reports. It is intended that a later edition of this book will contain an appendix of actual 2013 statistics, the last year before the Affordable Care Act became operational.
In its early configuration, Health Savings Accounts were envisioned as only paying for outpatient services, so why wouldn't it suffice to pay such claims with a debit card? Inpatient services, where market mechanisms are not practical for a helpless bed patient to negotiate, might be paid by using DRG values and approaches -- payment by diagnosis rather than individual services. It still remains a mystery why this approach isn't taken since the savings would seem to be considered as compared with the cumbersome claims form approach. How long it takes for a hospital or a drugstore to be paid by claims forms are not public knowledge, but it seems to take at least six weeks for a report to go to the patient that the claim has been acknowledged. For inpatients, the delay is usually twice as long and maybe six months. Whatever is the cause for this delay is unclear, and it may somehow be linked to whatever it is that insurance companies do with a claim form. If an auto dealer will accept a credit card, why a hospital can't do the same is unclear, indeed.
Health Savings Accounts for outpatient services are their own business, and how the high-deductible insurance linked to them handled claims was its business. Nobody asked why service benefits companies did things the way they did them, and it is still regarded as a sort of a company secret. Right now, the focus of public attention is on the 10% administrative cost of health insurance, and eventually how they conduct their business enters the discussion slowly. It really is a little hard to see why it costs so much to have someone pay your medical bills, and to outsiders, the whole approach seems bizarre. Since a debit card charges 1-2% for what it does, it really does not matter how either type of business does its work, what matters is demanding to know what value is created by the extra 8-9%, which amounts to quite a lot in aggregate. The same applies to DRG, except that the cost shifting between inpatient and outpatient has reached epic proportions. Today as I write this, I am told that a visit to a teaching hospital outpatient area for myself is billed for over two thousand dollars when as a physician I would suppose it might be less than a hundred dollars. But then, don't worry about it, you personally owe nothing at all. Is the public supposed to sit still for this sort of thing? Business ethics be hanged, I deserve to know what's going on, a lot better than I am being told. And even I understand better than most of the public that the general gist of it is to transfer costs between inpatients and outpatients while attempting to maintain the illusion of equal approaches.
On this level, we continue to ask why the claims form is used, or at least used so often, why the administrative cost is so high, why the service is so slow, and what we could suggest as a better way of doing things. When those questions settle down, the insurance company is entitled to return to its normal stance, that it is none of my business.
Meanwhile, perhaps public agitation on this level will stir up some competition, who will at least improve matters by making itself more clear.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Financing healthcare has four defined parts. You can get the money by contributing it to a Health Savings Account. You can accumulate more money by tax-free investment income added to what's in the fund. You can pay big expenses (mainly hospital inpatient costs) with a high-deductible insurance policy. And finally, if you don't have enough money, the government can subsidize you. The object of this hierarchy of choices is to pay for as much of it as you can, from investment income, which is a source of income no one had before. If that's not enough (usually because you got very sick much younger than average), you make it up by personal supplement, and if you exhaust even personal money, you get a government subsidy. If you are lucky and live to a ripe old age with money to spare, you can spend it on the extended thirty-year vacation at the end of life. This last point is important since without it there is no incentive to spend it carefully. For emphasis, let's repeat: for bookkeeping purposes, all Revenue collection is into the Health Saving Account , independent of disbursements or insurance for health care payments.
That's the basic plan, but there is a huge Medicare deficit, built up over years of failing to pay for it, and some may have to be spent on reducing that debt. We may have more financial crashes or other miscalculations, and premiums may have to be increased to pay for all this. Because no one can predict the future, there will have to be a judicial body to oversee how all of this is working out, and recommend mid-course corrections to Congress. The object of all this is to provide a fund to each individual which covers lifetime health costs so that subsidies are minimized, giving preference to subsidizing your own health costs but at a different time of life, perhaps under different financial circumstances. That's the easy part since the management of the pooled funds has a single mandate: make as much investment income as you possibly can, with as little investment expense as you can manage. If private investment funds do better than you do, be prepared to explain it to the judicial body which is made up of outstanding investors and is empowered to replace the management for poor performance. Meanwhile, the President is empowered to replace the judicial body itself for the poor performance of the fund, in consultation with the Senate. As long as the investment pool does as well as the average fund of its size, it should minimize the need to supplement revenue from individuals as well as subsidies, offset by the reduction of debt. And that is its main function.
While the revenues of this pooled lifetime fund are hard to predict, the managers need only assure that it is enough to pay legitimate costs, by informing Congress of the need to raise or lower subsidies. Failing to balance the books subsequently means only one thing: subscriber contributions must be raised or lowered. However, raising contributions should require the consent of Congress.
----------------------------------
Disbursements. Revenues may be hard to predict, but future health costs sixty or eighty years in advance, are impossible to predict. Certain principles seem fairly clear. Whether to include the premium for the high-deductible health insurance, should be an open option, allowed but not required. Individual marital, employment and other circumstances are too varied to justify a general rule. Whether to include patent remedies and unorthodox treatments, combined with the universal instinct to game the system, pretty much mandate the creation of a permanent oversight body to adjudicate such issues. It should be semi-independent of the government, which has the greatest temptation of all to shade its decisions with budget considerations. The managers of the revenue side should aim for at least 10% overfunding, and during the early transition phase may have to create a special transition (borrowing) fund, with plans to phase it out as the funds grow internally. A special re-insurance fund is also a suitable alternative. Ten years should be the limit to such transition funds, but the exact timing should be estimated at the onset and readjusted once after five years of operation. To do its job it will require a data collection and monitoring system. In most of these areas, it would resemble the Federal Reserve, able to regulate, but bound by the mandates of Congress. An additional, judicial body for the disbursements should be created, to create a pathway for appeals. determine the worth of new additions to claims, to render an opinion on whether obsolete claims costs are diminishing appropriately, and to make industry comparisons about expenses. Its composition should provide representation to major cost components of the claims, and Congress should hold hearings about nominations to the judicial body. Representatives of various industry groups should be allowed access to both the meetings of the board, and related subcommittees, but a suitable conflict of interest rules should be devised. The judicial body should be provided with data on demand, and pay close attention to trends, up or down. Industry groups should be free to introduce data of its own, and in the event of a protest, an appeal to a Congressional oversight committee.
It is the intention that funds in the Health Savings Accounts may be used to pay outpatient costs and catastrophic health reinsurance premiums, while hospital inpatient costs should be reimbursed by DRG methods out of the catastrophic health reinsurance. However, flexibility at the beginning of the program may well be required. Overall, however, subscribers should be encouraged to protect the build-up of their Health Savings Accounts by paying small costs out of pocket even if funds exist in the funds. When funds are utilized, the nature of the claims must be subject to limitation as to true medical need, until the funds grow comfortably above lifetime requirements. Debit cards are encouraged for HSA use, with usage matching a list of allowable claims; other electronic payment methods may appear in the future, and the managers are encouraged to permit reasonable flexibility in their adoption or experimentation. Subscribers should be provided with yearly reports, including a comparison with the experience of peer groups. Since the health coverage is intended to be a lifetime, the records should be a lifetime. The accounts may not be overdrawn, but private credit is permitted within industry-standard boundaries. In short, a myriad of details require some sort of address, and careful thought should be given to concentrating accounting, investing, technological, congressional and medical decisions into review by the appropriate sort of experts.
------------------------
Additional required legislation 1. Once data is available, the Secretary shall negotiate an agreement to reduce or eliminate Medicare payroll deductions and/or Medicare premiums in consideration that a) adequate funds are available in the individual HSA to pay for average Medicare claims costs in the last year of life, providing that contributions continue to grow at a sustainable rate b) that access to the funds for other purposes is then frozen awaiting appropriate balances to be achieved or c) that the age of the subscriber and the size of the fund assure a safe margin. d) Appropriate arrangements for certain age groups can be made to divert payroll deductions to be applied for this purpose, particularly during the transition period. e.)At the time of the individual's death, the HSA will reimburse Medicare for the average cost of the subscriber peer group's last year of life costs, plus any advances made in order to fund this arrangement. f) If more money is available than needed fore), the Secretary shall provide the option to increase or decrease the funds transfers to include more years of average claims costs than the last year of life (the accordion principle). This provision is primarily intended to cover the possibility of major changes in health costs, such as a cure for cancer, or epidemics of new diseases. It might also cover the slow build-up or decline in average costs over a period of time, requiring a major adjustment to keep the arrangement working as intended. This whole arrangement is built upon the assumption of a roughly continuing ratio between terminal care costs and earlier presumptions about them. It must adjust if the ratio changes.
2. Transparency and Price Controls. A satisfactory mechanism must be provided for any patient to learn, at least three months in advance, the price of any item or procedure for which a fixed price can be determined, and to which the provider is then held liable, regardless of whether insurance is involved or not. After six months of operating under this rule, a survey shall be conducted, after which the Secretary has the discretion to publish price comparisons between providers in the region. Further, providers are required to devise a match between outpatient costs (subject to competitive pricing) and DRG component costs, resulting (within 10%) in outpatient costs which are no lower or higher than the calculated inpatient costs, and comparable inpatient DRG ingredient costs which are no more than 10% higher than the competitive regional costs for the same item. Because of extra overhead costs resulting from the night, weekend and holiday operation, a hospital-wide overhead adjustment should be made, compared with regional levels, and made public. This overhead allowance may be made for inpatient and emergency care, but not for outpatient care. Furthermore, all indirect overhead costs shall be subject to an independent audit, frequently, routinely, and in both detailed and aggregate form made public.
George Washington soon learned he couldn't defend the country without taxes, so in time the Constitutional Convention lodged firm control over taxes in Congress. If we must have taxes, the people must control them. Except for defense, Congress has ever since been cautious about imposing taxes. Reducing taxes is quite in accord with this attitude, except net reduction of taxes, after raising them first, maybe a little tricky.
Net reduction of taxes is an important argument in favor of tax subsidies for Health Savings Accounts, using them as incentives to healthy people to "tax" themselves while they remain young and healthy. Investing the money internally, the subscribers can meanwhile protect it for their own use when they inevitably grow old and sickly. If interest greater than the rate of inflation is paid, the money returned should exceed the money invested. Investing the money tax-free further helps the process. If people get back more than they contributed, they recognize it as frugal, saving for a rainy day, and so on. Lifetime Health Savings Accounts were designed as a way to enhance this thinking, and are described in Chapter Two. Over thirty years have elapsed since John McClaughry and I met in Ronald Reagan's Executive Office Building in Washington, but there has been a continuing search for ways to strengthen personal savings for health while avoiding temptations to tax our grandchildren, or to make money out of harmless neighbors. Many of the financial novelties naturally derive from models in the financial and insurance industries. This book in largely a result of such thinking.o
But the biggest advance of all has nevertheless come from medical scientists, who reduced the cost of diseases by eliminating one darned disease after another, and meanwhile increased the earning power of compound interest -- by lengthening the life span. We thus luckily encountered a "sweet spot", where conventional interest rates of 6% or better take a sharp turn upward, while 3% of inflation still remains fairly constant. My friends warn me it must yet be shown we have lengthened life enough, or reduced the disease burden, enough to carry all of the medical care. That may well be true, but we seem close enough to justify giving it a trial as a partial solution. Before the debt gets any bigger, that is, and class antagonisms get any worse.
While Health Savings Accounts continue to seem superior to the Affordable Care proposals, you can seldom be quite sure about details until both have been given a fair trial. The word "mandatory" is, therefore, better avoided at the beginning, and awarded only after it has been earned. As a different sort of example, the ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974) had been years in the making but eventually came out pretty well. In spite of initial misgivings, ERISA got along with the Constitution and its Tenth Amendment, and the McCarran Ferguson Act which depends on them. We had the Supreme Court's assurance the Constitution is not a suicide pact. So with this general line of thinking, and still grumbling about the way the Affordable Care Act was enacted, I had decided to hold off and watch. The 1974 strategy devised in ERISA, by the way, turned out to be fundamentally sound. The law was hundreds of pages long, but its premise was simple. It was to establish pensions and healthcare plans as freestanding companies, substantially independent of the employer who started and paid for them. Having got the central idea right, other issues eventually fell into place. Perhaps something like that could emerge from Obamacare.
Nevertheless, growing costs are ominous for a law proclaiming it intends to make healthcare Affordable. After several years of tinkering, this program stops looking like mere mission-creep and starts to look like faulty reasoning, maybe even the wrong diagnosis. While waiting for the Obama Administration to demonstrate how the Act's present deficiencies could justify rising medical prices and greatly increased regulation, I brushed up seven or eight possible improvements to Health Savings Accounts, just in case. They had been germinating during the decades after Bill Archer, of the House Ways and Means Committee, got Health Savings Accounts enacted. However, my proposed new amendments wouldn't change the issues enough to cause me to write a hostile book. More recently, some newer variations grabbed me: Health Savings Accounts might become lifetime insurance, and thereby save considerably more money, without the fuss Obamacare was causing. Furthermore, in 2007 the nation immediately stumbled into an unrelated financial tangle, almost as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s. A depression might lower prices, but if it provoked accelerating deflation, we could be cooked. And thirdly, the mistake of the Diagnosis Related Groups was such a simple one, failure to understand it might not be a complete description. Seen in their best light, unrecognized mistakes were about to disrupt a functioning system, while simple solutions were sometimes ignored. Maybe the problem was trying to spend our way out of extravagance, made worse by massive transfers from the private sector to the public one -- actually, just the opposite of what Keynes proposed. And finally, individually owned and thus portable policies, always held the potential for a small compound investment income. But the recent thirty-year extension of average life expectancy is what really changed the rules. The potential for much greater revenue from compound interest made an appearance, simply waiting for the recession to clear, and to be given a chance to prove itself with normal interest rates.
Cost is the main problem. The Affordable Care Act might be making the wrong diagnosis, even though it used the right name. Employer-based insurance did create pre-existing conditions, and job-lock; losing your job did mean losing your health insurance, and often it was a hard choice. If employer-basing caused the problem, why didn't the business community fix it? Is the only possible solution to pass laws against pre-existing conditions and job lock? Maybe, even probably, a better approach was to break, soften, or change the link between health insurance and the employer. Sever that linkage, and the other problems just go away; perhaps less drastic modification could even achieve the same result. ERISA had discovered such a new concept, forty years earlier. Employers might well bristle at the obvious ingratitude, but real causes were creeping up on them unawares. Generations of patronizing legislators had found it easier to raise taxes on the big, bad corporations, than on poor little you and me. Employers had always received a tax deduction for giving away health insurance to employees, but now, aggregate corporate double taxation made it approach fifty percent of corporate revenue. Nobody gives away fifty percent of his income graciously; for its part, the Government thought it couldn't afford to lose such a large source of tax revenue. Big business prefers to avoid the subject, while big government tends to mislabel things. It's mainly a difference in style.
Another issue: the approaching retirement of baby-boomers slowly revealed that Medicare, wonderful old Medicare with nothing whatever wrong with it, had been heavily subsidized by the U.S. Treasury, which was now paying its 50 percent subsidy out of borrowing from foreign countries, notably Communist China. Medicare's companion, Medicaid, subsidized by an elaborate scheme of hospital cost-shifting, transferred most of its losses back to Medicare. And, guess what, the Affordable Care Act transferred 15 million uninsured people into Medicaid. By this time, Medicaid had become hopelessly underfunded and poorly managed, and 15 million angry people were about to find out what they had been dumped into. Other maneuvers affecting the employees of big business are delayed a year or two, so we may not discover what they amount to, until after the next election, four or even five years after enactment. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve "solved" the problem of mortgage-backed securities by buying three trillion dollars worth of them. That may not seem to have anything to do with Obamacare, except it pretty well crowds out any hope of buying our way lose of this new trouble. And it sure underlined our central problem. There was nothing all that bad about the quality of a fee-for-service healthcare system which gave everybody thirty extra years of life in one century. Two extra years of life expectancy even emerged in the past four calendar years, in fact. Our problem is lack of money. Lack of money, big-time, and Obamacare was going to cost even more. Health Savings Accounts, new style, emerged from all this confusion as a possible rescue for the cost problem. All this, helped me decide to write this book.
There are some who persuasively argue our even bigger problem is Constitutional. Perhaps because I'm a doctor rather than a lawyer, I don't consider the Constitution to be our problem, I consider it to be Mr. Obama's problem. Because the 1787 Constitutional Convention was convened to unite thirteen sovereign colonies into a single nation -- and splitting it into more pieces wasn't on anybody's mind at all -- they reached a compromise, brokered by two Pennsylvanians, John Dickinson, and Benjamin Franklin. The small states wanted unity for defense, but they also wanted to retain control of their local commerce. They knew very well big states would control commerce in a unified national government unless something fundamental was done to prevent it. Speaking in modern terms, a uniform new health insurance system risks being designed to please big cities who mostly want to hold prices down and wakes up. Sparsely settled regions want -- or need -- to be able to raise prices, here and there, when shortages appear, of neurosurgeons or something like that. The full algorithm is: price controls always cause shortages, so shortages are only cured by paying a higher price. Eventually the Constitution was engineered to give power over all commerce to the several states; otherwise, the small states declared there would be no unified nation.
That's how we got a Federal government with only a few limited powers, reserving anything else to the states. Absolutely everything else was to be a power of the states, except to the degree the Civil War caused us to reconsider some details (which Franklin Roosevelt's Supreme Court-packing enlarged). So, that's why the 1787 Constitution effectively lodged health insurance regulation (among many other things) in the fifty states. Furthermore, The Constitution in the later form of the 1945 McCarran Ferguson Act thereby definitively insulates health insurance from federal regulation, reinforcing the point in a very explicit Tenth Amendment. This may regrettably create difficulties for interstate businesses, and for people who get new jobs in new states. Many states have too small a population to support the actuarial needs of more than one health insurance company, thus creating monopolies in many states and consequent resentment of monopoly behavior. So, work it out. But don't give us a uniform national health system.
There, in a nutshell, you have a brief restatement of the Constitution's commerce issue in the language of the Original Intent point of view. The Constitution as a living document is all very well, but there must be some limits to stretching its plain language; otherwise, it becomes hard to understand what in the world people are talking about.
City dwellers have trouble imagining anyone in favor of either higher prices or lower wages, let alone negotiable prices as the central bulwark of a different way of life. The Civil War toned it down a little, but if it is nothing else, our system is tough-minded and realistic, doesn't surrender easily. The U.S. Supreme Court may soon make the Constitution and its central compromises into the central issue of the day, or they may wiggle and squirm out of it. But as long as they keep squirming, cost containment will remain the central commotion of the Affordable Care controversy. In certain parts of the country, price controls are seen as just one step before shortages appear. That's not entirely unsophisticated. As we will see when we come to it, lifetime Health Savings Accounts could materially reduce the sting of the cost issue, and thus made the final decision for me to write this book. The Constitutional issue, possibly, lurks for another day.
The case in point. On the particular Constitutional point, I would comment whole-life insurance companies in the past seem mainly to have addressed the Federal-State issue by obtaining multiple licenses to sell their products, state by state. Which might bring the Constitutional issue right back, because most insurance companies in practice attempt to be compatible with the largest states, just as John Dickinson predicted they would. In effect, the smaller states are forced to accept whatever regulations the big states have chosen first, or else they might have to do without some new product. Whole-life insurance seems rather less subject to the problem of conflicting regulations because that industry inadvertently acquired another trump card. Life insurance mostly uses bonds in its portfolio, matching fixed income with fixed liability. That's a noble thought, but the additional practicality has surely occurred to insurers that state governments issue a lot of bonds, and insurance companies are major customers for bonds.
Lifetime HSAs could solve the problem of differing state regulations by allowing the individual subscriber to select a managing organization domiciled in "foreign" states, and thus indirectly if the individual chooses, select a different home state for its regulatory climate. After all, the nation has changed in two centuries from a culture of farming in the same local region most of your life, to one where it seems normal to change home states almost yearly. Businesses tied to local laws like insurance, do not move easily. The consequence for lifetime Health Savings Accounts might be a niche market for health insurance in small or sparsely settled states, or others which reject specific California or New York State regulations. Paradoxically, California presently has over a million HSA subscribers, so we must not underestimate the ingenuity of necessary workarounds. Eventually, local pressure mounts to change local regulation, doubtless balanced by the attractiveness of acquiring disaffected customers from out-of-state. All of this could be accelerated by internet direct billing. Consequently, to avert this, we propose:
Proposal 6: Companies which manage health insurance products, particularly Health Savings Accounts, should be permitted to select the state in which they are domiciled, but must, therefore, accept the domicile-state's regulation of corporations. Such licensed corporations may sell direct billing products into any other state; but products sold in another state must mainly conform to the regulations of the state in which the particular insurance operates, even to the point of disregarding any conflicting regulations by the state of corporate domicile.
Comment: Fifty years ago, the main function of any State Insurance Commissioner was to assure the continued solvency of insurance companies, so insurance would be available when the customers needed it. In the past few decades, however, many insurance commissioners with populist leanings have viewed themselves as protectors of the public against price gouging. That is, they adopt the big-city, big-state, point of view. One Insurance Commissioner attitude might thus insist on high premiums, Commissioners with another attitude might reward low premiums. Insurance companies should, therefore, welcome laws which make it easier to switch the state of domicile, since the attitudes of insurance commissioners can change very quickly.
Comment: Lifetime insurance was pressed forward by discovering the investment world's computer-driven innovations might make lifetime coverage far easier, less chance, and considerably more financially attractive, than coverage in self-contained annual slices. It is common knowledge in insurance circles that most term life insurance would be unprofitable, except so many people drop their policies. Therefore the attitudes of different states are not completely predictable. Some states are more aggressive than others in adopting new technology, for example.
Changes in Future Cost Volatility. At an advanced age, illnesses are more severe and more sudden. Right now, increasing longevity also mostly affects elderly people who live longer toward the end of life, by widening the interval between the last two major illnesses. You can never be entirely sure that will continue to be the case because medical care and its science constantly evolve. Furthermore, the cost of care often has more to do with the patent status of a drug or device, than with its manufacturing cost, sometimes turning a cheap illness into an expensive one.
One thing you can be sure of, restructuring health insurance in the way to be suggested in Chapter Two, would result in a general reduction of health insurance markup, by exposing local insurance to the more nationwide competition. Health costs themselves might skyrocket, or they might largely disappear, but in any event, will probably end up cheaper than by using other payment methods. No doubt critics will find large numbers of nits to pick since states retain the right to design idiosyncratic regulations, but new regulations would remain semi-optional for residents to the extent some neighboring state disagreed with them. No matter what else turns up, it will be pretty hard to match the cost variation from national marketing, demonstrated by ten minutes of internet cruising. In fact, the great obstacles to an effective system in the past, like "job lock" and "pre-existing conditions", present no obstacle at all to lifetime HSA within an HSA regulatory framework. Many problems would stand exposed as artificial creations of linking health insurance to employers, at least as long as health insurance remains modeled on term life insurance. Just change to a more natural system tested for a century as whole-life insurance, and such technical problems might simply vanish. Even slow adoption, based on public wariness about a new idea, has its advantages.
Although prediction of future sea change is uncertain, a brief review suggests future healthcare financing could very well become highly volatile, in both frequency and costliness. Therefore, spreading the risk with insurance gets more attractive to age groups unable to recover from major financial setbacks. Planners would do well to consider such things as last-year-of life insurance, or some other layer of special reinsurance. Immediately, such ideas raise the question of multiple coverages, with multiple tax exemptions providing room for gaming the system. No doubt, this was the thinking behind imposing regulations prohibiting multiple coverages with HSA, and probably eventually ACA as well. There must be a better way to handle this dilemma than forbidding multiple coverages. Multiple coverages are very apt to be exactly what we will need to encourage. Since living too long and dying too soon are mutually exclusive, consideration should be given to placing tax-deductibility at the time of service, and permitting deductions for the one that actually happens to you. It is thus possible to envision having four or five different coverages, but only one tax deduction. Since the purpose is to spread the risk, we might even go to the extreme of limiting the number of policies that charge premiums, into the one that actually happens to you, but paid out of a common pool. Planners with a more conventional background might well snort at such ideas. Until, of course, they themselves need a life-saving drug costing ten thousand dollars an injection for an extremely rare condition, under a patent which will expire in a year.
So, Let's Get Started with Pilot Experiments in the Willing States. The original idea of modestly improving the original Health Savings Accounts, continues to stand on its own two feet. It's what I would point to right away if you feel unsuited to the Affordable Care Act, or even to ERISA plans. Right now, anybody under 65 (who does not have, or whose spouse does not have) other government health insurance, including Veteran's benefits can enroll in an HSA, and any insurance company can offer a product containing minor variations of the idea, within the limits of the law. A number of Internet sites list sponsors for HSAs. For ease of understanding, we present this idea as if we had two proposals, term and whole life.
Actually, the term-insurance version is the only one which is currently legal, whereas the whole-life variety remains only a proposal. It seems necessary to regard the whole HSA topic as one proposal for immediate use, and a second proposal as a goal for future migration. In fact, almost 12 million people already are subscribers to the term variety, having deposited a total of nearly 23 billion dollars in them. The internet contains brief summaries of their policy variations. At this early stage of development, it is only possible to conjecture that small and sparsely populated states will probably develop more liberal regulations, while bigger and more densely populated states will probably develop bigger and more sophisticated sponsoring organizations. Anyone of the fifty states, however, might someday change its regulations to make itself attractive as a "home state", and at present, it is possible to transfer allegiance.
Unfortunately, current regulations exclude members or dependents of government health insurance programs including veterans' benefits, from depositing new funds in HSAs. It's easy to see why loopholes might allow an individual to get multiple tax exemptions in an unintended way. But loopholes are a two-way street. The early subscribers tend to be younger, averaging about 40 years of age, and probably of better than average health because it would probably require a horizon of two or three years to build up the size of an account to the point where an individual feels adequately protected. That's a result of a $3300 annual contribution limit, and a scarcity of variants of affordable high-deductible catastrophic coverage. This is one instance where "the lower the deductible, the higher the premium" puts the subscriber at risk for the first few years. And that, rather than loophole-seeking, is the reason early adopters are younger, healthier and wealthier; the regulations give them an incentive to be. Let's stop saying, "My way or the highway." If there is a reasonable fear of double tax exemption, the regulation ought to state its real purpose. Otherwise, "Let a hundred flowers bloom", regardless of oriental origins, is a better flag to fly. If a national goal is to get more people to have health insurance, we should be hesitant to impose impediments on it.
On June 26, 2015, the United States Supreme Court handed down its opinion on King v. Burwell , essentially leaving the Affordable Care Act unchanged. Much will be written about this controversial opinion, but little of it would have to do with Health Savings Accounts.
If anyone is interested in my opinion about the contested language in the law, it is derived from reading Jacob S. Hacker's book about the passage of the Clinton Health Plan, called The Road to Nowhere . The plan as described by Hacker, was to plant deliberately conflicting proposals in the House and Senate bills, so the real proposal could remain concealed until the House-Senate conference committee meeting, where the versions meant to survive could be identified. The final result could thus be released when the press was absent, preferably on the eve of a holiday.
It didn't happen in the case of Hillary Clinton's plan (which was never fully released), while in the case of President Obama's Plan, it was suspended in mid-operation by the death of Senator Kennedy. But the Senate version had been passed by a friendly Senate, so the House was forced to vote on an identical bill, to avoid returning to a conference committee convened by a newly hostile Senate. This version of the story fits the known facts pretty well and is reinforced by Hacker's subsequent membership on the Obama election team. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court's later decision constitutes an endorsement of a parliamentary maneuver which ought to be forbidden. Let's now break off this conjecture, and return to Health Savings Accounts.
My original intent in 2014 was to offer Lifetime Health Savings Accounts (L-HSA) in such a way the two programs (ACA and HSA) could be negotiated into a compromise that both could live with. In time, they would eventually evolve into hybrids that both would be proud of, or else lead the voters to state a clear preference for either one to be exclusive after they had a taste of both. Offhand, I could see no value for either one to be declared mandatory if that would still leave 30 or so million people uninsured. "Mandatory" did not seem like a helpful word to use, and often it seemed harmful to someone. In applying a computer search engine to the Affordable Care Act, I was unable to find a single use of the word "mandatory". Looking back on it, its premise was flawed but its intent was felt to be benign, so perhaps face-saving boilerplate was called for.
The central feature of the Savings Account has always revolved around the fact that youthful health care is usually cheap, while health care for the elderly is expensive. Many decades of tax-free compound interest at 6.5% would thus have been allowed to build up in some sort of escrow under both plans, until the age when healthcare really gets expensive. At that point, it would not matter which program it was assisting, and both sides would stop looking for a victory. By that time, I wouldn't be surprised if the deficits of the Medicare program had become so fearsome, and the debts of the program become so threatening, that both sides would be willing to consider modifications of Medicare. If not, subscribers to a buy-out had built up a six-figure retirement fund.
Medicare is already more than 50% subsidized by taxes and foreign borrowing, but the public scarcely knows it. I believe it is just a matter of time before the public realizes where it is going, but right now they see Medicare as getting a dollar's worth of healthcare for 50 cents if they think about it at all. I suspect it would take a full year or more of intense Congressional work to fill in the action details of a lifetime or lifecycle system, and maybe longer than that to re-direct public opinion. The proposal is voluntary, no politician dares to force it down anyone's throat. And the proposed incremental steps would also be voluntary. The investments would be in personal accounts, so no one could divert them for aircraft carriers. And the accounts would be lucrative, so no one needs to be afraid of their solvency.
Because compound interest on savings from the working years tends to rise after about age 45, a long period of Health Savings Accounts generates much more money than from a string of disconnected single years. Like the difference between term insurance and whole life insurance, you can't judge the improved investment of L-HSA by multiplying one C-HSA time your life expectancy, so it is a subtlety that two continuous programs would generate more funds than two separated ones.
Meanwhile, we have Classical Health Savings Accounts (C-HSA) which already have more than 15 million satisfied subscribers, steadily growing in number. Most of the Obamacare subscribers wouldn't want HSAs, and most of the HSA subscribers wouldn't consider the ACA plan, so total insured would increase. HSAs are described in the first chapter of this book, and in 35 years only about four or five improvements have come along, awaiting Congressional approval, but the bipartisan passage of them would calm the waters considerably. They need a tax deduction for the Catastrophic health insurance premiums, to make their owners just like everyone else. The easiest way to accomplish this is to extend permission for the Accounts themselves (which are tax-exempt) to purchase the catastrophic insurance which is required. Catastrophic health insurance is itself tangled in Obamacare regulations, which need to be revised, to deserve Presidential signature from any President. The annual deposit limits now need to be liberalized, and restated as total lifetime limits to account for the varying ages of new subscribers.
And new regulations need to accommodate the new phenomenon of passive investing, which is deservedly sweeping the nation, providing much lower transaction costs and higher average returns, which might be made still higher. Although HSAs are mostly self-administered, new investment managers are a little afraid of them, and well-established firms do not yet seem to recognize their enormous long-term potential. For these reasons, many early investors have been "savvy financial people", an image I am very anxious to see the change to "ordinary folks", without resulting in "high fees for rubes".
To return to the Supreme Court's King decision, the only version of HSA which is ready to go is the Classical one, which would still be improved by a few amendments, if the President is of a mind to cooperate. His own plan seems more or less in suspense, waiting for Big Business to emerge from its policy huddle, after two years of delay. Many tradeoffs and compromises can be envisioned for that coordination, of by far the biggest eligible group of subscribers. It is my commentary that employers' gift of health insurance in 1945 has long since been compensated for, by a corresponding drop in wages. So nothing but a tax exemption is left. The amount of money involved is so huge, it requires other issues to be brought into the discussion to avoid a stock market panic. It particularly needs to be emphasized that a loophole based on the corporate income tax rate is not at all -- not at all -- the same as an increase or decrease of corporate income at that rate. Getting a free lollipop at a 60% discount does not affect your company's income by 60%.
Nevertheless, the existence of fringe benefit tax dodges does create pressure to retain the high corporate taxes, and those taxes need to be reduced to keep our corporations from fleeing to tax havens abroad. My suggestion is to lower the corporate income tax in parallel with a comparable reduction of the employer tax dodge, a maneuver so delicate it ought to be overseen by the Federal Reserve, acting under a Congressional time limit. Such a proposal is so newsworthy it might well suck the air out of the room for Health Savings Accounts, and Obamacare, too. Everyone involved has an incentive to be cautious and reasonable, a difficult thing to be, during an election year. However, with prudence, breaking the logjam on the migration of American corporations to foreign locations could be the thing which suddenly gets everyone's attention.
New Health Savings Accounts (N-HSA)
Because it increasingly seems so unlikely a notoriously stubborn President would ditch his health plan at this late date, I turned my attention to seeing what could be done with using Health Savings Accounts for what's left. Obamacare is likely to be subject to twists and turns until after the November 2016 elections, and this administration has a history of preferring to operate out of sight. Therefore, my revised plan was to avoid the subject as much as possible, except for one thing. The savings in a portion of the Account would continue to accumulate as a tax-exempt investment account, available for extra medical expenses until age 66 when it turns into a retirement account. That is, an N-HSA account could exist untouched for as many as 45 years (21-66) without catastrophic backup insurance, or else if agreeable, with a catastrophic policy coordinated with an Obamacare policy. The purpose of this part of the structure was to provide a haven for a long-term buildup of funds, with as few financial drains on it as possible, while it stays out of the way. On the other hand, money seems no good if you can't spend it, so it needs some contingency exists.
It is possible to summarize a great deal of thinking by stating that it mostly can't be done. The evolution in healthcare has not reached the point where people aged 21 to 66 could save enough to support the rest of the population while taking care of their own health. In fifteen years that might become possible, but not yet. Even then, an additional thirty million people who are unemployable (prisoners in custody, disabled people, and illegal immigrants) would probably topple the system without some major reductions in the cost of chronic diseases (diabetes, Alzheimers, arthritis, emphysema, kidney failure) which might well take another fifty years. So we temporarily set this attractive idea aside.
Except for one thing, paying for children under 21. The system devised was to overfund Medicare slightly, gather investment income for a combined 104 years, and transfer the result to a grandchild or pool of grandchildren to pay for 21 years of healthcare. The grandparent transfers the money at the death after 83 years of compounding, but the child receives a lump sum at birth and erodes it to near zero by the 21st birthday. This is how 104 years are available to the next generation to grow a contribution of $42 to $27,000 while staying within the limits of the Law of Perpetuities. To do this requires passive investing of a total-stock index averaging 6.5% net of 3% inflation. According to records by students of the subject, the total stock market has averaged 11% returns for a century, in spite of wars and depressions. Right now, the main obstacle to achieving this is the community of middle-men in the financial world. It the problem continues to be a stubborn one, I advise taking delivery on the stock index security, putting it in a safe deposit box, and opening it decades later.
One issue comes up, that this system could produce unlimited amounts of inflated money by escalating the initial single payment. But it cannot do so if the account balance starts from, or must go to, zero. If loopholes are discovered, additional points of zero balance could be imposed.
Medicare Backup Insurance. In the original planning of Health Savings Accounts, it never seemed likely we would lack places to spend money earmarked for healthcare. However, 45 years really is a long time to have your money locked out of reach. The other side of this coin is the spectacular result of long-term passive investing. Just to throw in a couple of examples, the investment of $1000 at age 21 would result in a fund of $16,000 at age 66, and an investment of $1000 a year, every year from 21-66, would accumulate a fund of $246,375 at age 66, quite a nice retirement fund. And if you were lucky enough to live frugally, from 66 to 83 the $16,000 would grow to $ 43,800, and the $246,000 would grow to $680,165. If you grow uneasy about Medicare solvency, these sums would be nice to have in the bank. In effect, they could serve the function of catastrophic self-insurance, without the insurance.
As a matter of fact, it would be nice to include a provision that the Health Savings Account could dispense with the expense of catastrophic insurance when it grows to a point equalling it. It would dramatize the subtle transformation, from an account for drugstore expenses, into a serious investment tool. That won't happen soon, and it won't happen to everyone, but it is a realistic goal.
Healthcare for Children. Now, that leads into an entirely different direction. One of the perpetual headaches of designing health care finance is the fact that newborn babies are expensive. Part of that is due to inordinate malpractice costs for obstetrics, partly it is due to expensive care being devoted to premature babies and Caesarian sections. But mainly it is due to the parents being young people without much savings. It's pretty hard to design a pre-funded health care plan for an individual who starts the second year of life with a $10,000 debt.
His parents barely climb out of a financial hole before the child himself is ready to have children. As we have seen in earlier paragraphs, some frugal grandparents end up with more healthcare money than they can spend on their own health. American mothers average 2.1 babies apiece, and with a little fumbling it can be seen, that figure averages one grandchild per grandparent. If aggregate health care for children 0-21 averages $29,000, Grandpa could give a child a very nice start on life by rolling over his surplus at age 83 to a grandchild at birth -- if the laws permit such a thing, particularly if no family connection exists. (We'll have to leave unorthodox family sexual preferences to the matrimonial lawyers to sort out. )
With ingenuity, an additional 21 years can be added to the period of compound interest, and we've already shown what a difference that can make in an 83 (or maybe 93) year lifespan. In case you missed the point, when Grandpa relieves the cost of healthcare for a grandchild, the benefit is indirectly felt by the child's parents, although that isn't invariably true. Right now, the cost of a child's healthcare is the responsibility of the parent, so it's relatively fair.
Payroll Deductions and Premiums for Medicare. With 300 million citizens, a lot of exceptional cases can arise, and the foregoing probably doesn't contain enough incentives to start a stampede for N-HSA. Accordingly, let's consider forgiving the Medicare payroll deduction, in whole or in part, as a legitimate spending outlet. And if that isn't enough, consider waiving Medicare premiums. Both of these are legitimate health costs, so no one is violating the purpose of a tax deduction for Health Savings Accounts. Each one of them covers about a quarter of Medicare costs, so the funds are ample. (The present average costs of Medicare are about $180,000 per lifetime).
And finally, there's your Social Security contribution. SS isn't a medical cost, but it's a retirement cost, and that's what N-HSA could turn into. Reducing any or all of these expenses will free up a comparable amount of spendable income. If all else fails, consider abating your income tax. Income tax isn't a health expense, but it is often the largest item in a retiree budget. Reducing income tax could displace other funds designated for health costs, and hence indirectly could sometimes be considered a health cost, itself. There are plenty of ways to create savings with the government, and all you probably really need is their permission to do it.
To repeat, the purpose of all this is to find a way to subsidize the health expenses of children, which in my view is the unsuspected stumbling block for all self-funded lifetime proposals. Even the tax-evasive employer-based system gets into a tangle over it.
Subsidies for the Poor. We must conclude by mentioning poor people. It's, of course, true you have to start with some money to earn income from it. What are you going to offer poor folks, when the country is already deeply in debt? Well, it's practically impossible to say what Obamacare is going to do for them, although it will surely do what it can. The possibility of double-subsidies is still present when the situation is as unstable as it is, and the economy is as fragile as it is. So this proposal prefers to delay the subsidy discussion until Obamacare is also on the table.
To facilitate that discussion, this plan has been forced to organize the subsidy money for poor folks to come out of the age group 21-66, who are effectively the only real creators of wealth in the whole system. That coincides with Obamacare, and cannot be effectively discussed without including it. However, once it is coordinated, the subsidy to poor people could be quite substantial as a result of being placed at the far end of the compound interest curve and given enough years to work in an escrow account. If came to a showdown, the subscriber could take delivery on an index fund certificate and put it in a bank lockbox until it was needed. I propose separating subsidies from all healthcare and funding them independently. Independent of the intermediaries of their grants, that is.
To summarize, we start with a regular Health Savings Account with obstructions removed. In return for allowing the HSA to remain in the background, gathering interest, the HSA effectively assists Medicare. Assisting Medicare could mean helping in a Medicare buy-out, or it could be used to help Social Security. Or it could recirculate through Grandpa, to help the coming generation. An option for Grandpa to make the choice would simplify administration, but possibly unbalance something else.
109 Volumes
Philadephia: America's Capital, 1774-1800 The Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from 1774 to 1788. Next, the new republic had its capital here from 1790 to 1800. Thoroughly Quaker Philadelphia was in the center of the founding twenty-five years when, and where, the enduring political institutions of America emerged.
Philadelphia: Decline and Fall (1900-2060) The world's richest industrial city in 1900, was defeated and dejected by 1950. Why? Digby Baltzell blamed it on the Quakers. Others blame the Erie Canal, and Andrew Jackson, or maybe Martin van Buren. Some say the city-county consolidation of 1858. Others blame the unions. We rather favor the decline of family business and the rise of the modern corporation in its place.
Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
