Plant manager Bill Neighbors said he knows too well what President Obama is talking about when he warns that ever-rising health care costs are hurting the ability of U.S. businesses to compete overseas.
“Here in Southeast Kansas, we believe we can compete with anyone in the world when it comes to fabricating steel,” said Neighbors, who runs the 150-employee Tank Connections plant in Parsons. “We do it with technology and by being real good at what we do. But when it comes to health insurance, there is nothing we can do. We can’t compete.”
Last year, Neighbors said, Tank Connections’ health insurance premiums went up 18 percent; this year, another 30 percent.
“That is utterly ridiculous,” he said, doing little to hide his anger. “Down here, the assumption is this is all driven by greed; it’s not in check with the rest of the world.”
Like many small business managers and owners, Neighbors has been following the national health reform debate. But he said he’s not optimistic.
“When you’re in business, you look at your options and you respond,” Neighbors said. “But when I hear them talking about reforming the system…I hear the option of the government doing more. My response to that is ‘What other options are there? Are you telling me there’s only one?’”
Last week, KHI News Service interviewed several small business operators to hear their perspectives on the health reform debate.
Doesn’t like mandates
The current system, most agreed, is unsustainable, but support among them for government-led reform was, at best, tepid.
“I’m not too much in favor of the government getting involved in offering the public option they’re talking about,” said Jerry Soukup, comptroller at Cashco, an Ellsworth company that manufactures valves for the chemical industry.
“I just seems like government is getting into more and more things — it bailed out the banks, it bailed out the auto industry, and now it wants to reform the health care system,” Soukup said. “I think it’s in enough things already.”
Soukup said he’s also uncomfortable with the reform proposals that would require companies to offer their employees health insurance and that individuals have it.
“I feel sorry for someone who doesn’t have health insurance; I think everybody ought to have it,” he said. “And I can’t imagine Cashco not covering its employees, but I don’t know that it’s up to government to make somebody have insurance it they don’t think they need it or they don’t want it.”
Soukup said Cashco has about 165 employees and “our benefit package is excellent.”
Dirty word
E. F. “Sonny” Zetmeir, president of Grandview Products Company in Parsons, said he’s grown tired of the attacks on health insurers’ profits.
“They’re being vilified,” he said. “It’s like ‘profit’ has become a dirty word.”
Zetmeir said he appreciated having his insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas, positioned between his company and the hospitals.
“I would hate like hell to have to navigate that system without them,” he said, “I mean, without them you’d be at the mercy of the hospitals. Some people lose sight of that.”
Zetmeir also said he was opposed to requiring everyone to have health insurance.
“For a family, our plan costs $40 a week. It comes with a $750 deductable and a $25 co-pay. That’s a pretty good deal,” he said. “But we’ve got a couple people who say they rather not have it. That’s fine, that’s their business. But you know what? When something goes wrong — when somebody in their family gets sick — I have very little sympathy for them. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is. I’m not going to make you have insurance, but I think you have a responsibility to yourself and your family to have it.”
Grandview Products offers its workers and their dependents free flu shots.
“We always have,” Zetmeir said. “I don’t want our employees to get sick. I don’t want their kids to get sick. This is a small company, we’re family.
“As a practical matter,” he said, “if I can prevent one or two flu cases from turning into pneumonia, I’ve paid for the shots.”
Zetmeir said he has little faith in the federal government’s ability to solve problems. He cited calls for expanding Medicaid and using government subsidies to insure the nation’s 45 million uninsured children and adults.
“Has anybody thought of who’s going to take care of all these 45 million people?” he said. “Here in Parsons, we’re short on family practitioners. When a young family moves to town, they call around and everybody tells them they’re not accepting new patients, they’re full. And now we’re going to have 45 million more people looking for a doctor? It doesn’t make sense.”
‘Some positives’
Adrian DeRusso, general manager at the Ottawa Cooperative in Ottawa, said he’s not automatically opposed to government-led health reform.
“Oh, I’ve cussed the government plenty of times,” he said. “But I think when you stop and look at the big picture, there have been some positives. I know the workplace, for example, is a lot safer than it used to be.”
Still, he said, he recognized that government-run programs “tend to cumbersome and awkward.”
The cooperative’s health insurance premiums increased this year.
“We’d been pretty stable for the last two or three years but somebody got hurt and our rates went up 15 percent in a blink,” DeRusso said. “I’ve never seen something so sensitive.”
DeRusso is a former member of the Ransom Memorial Hospital board of directors.
“I don’t think the average person realizes how much our little hospital has to write off every year. It’s in the millions,” he said. “I hear all this talk about how many billions of dollars reform is going to costs us, but I have to wonder if we aren’t paying for it already; we just don’t know it.”
DeRusso said he’s not opposed to requiring everyone to have insurance or requiring insurance companies to cover everyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions.
“I see how ‘broadening the pool’ could make it work,” he said. “But there would have to be some kind of monitoring, some kind of controls on cost — and that’s what scares me. I don’t know if the federal government is up to it. It’s going to have to be done right.”
-Dave Ranney is a staff writer for KHI News Service, which specializes in coverage of health issues facing Kansans. He can be reached at dranney@khi.org or at 785-233-5443, ext. 128.