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Show t The Enterprise Review , October 27 , 1976 by Chuck Akerlow Investment Summary One of the interesting Chuck Akerlow alternatives to rising health care costs can be found in the Family Health Plan of Salt Lake City. FHP is a health maintenance organization similar to the Kaiser Plans of California, Oregon and Colorado. The problem with health care today is that the system rewards physicians, hospitals and others only when you are sick. A physician or a hospital makes little income from you if you are well and never need its services. As a result, when you need routine check-upit is to his advantage as well as the other players in the health care system to hospitalize you for tests. The effect of this is to raise health care s, . costs since hospitalization is an especially expensive way to perform a routine medical examination. One of the reasons that physicians take advantage of the hospitalization route is that the insurance companies typically will not pay for outpatient services in a physicians office but will cover them if hospitalized. The Family Health Plan works on a different economic incentive. The individual subscriber pays a premium of so many dollars per month for virtually all of his health care. This means that if hospitalized his premiums remain the same and do not increase even though its demands on the system may be greater. The physicians and other medical personnel derive their income from the gross amount of dollars the plan takes in. Out of that gross they must pay all of their salaries, all hospital bills or medications, all marketing and administrative costs and all other expenses provided for in the basic What is left over plan. becomes profit to them and essentially in their pocket. Their incentive, therefore, is to keep you well. The less hospitalization you have the more income they make since hospitalization is an extremely costly part of the patient's total medical care and the Kaiser plan has demonstrated in every market in which it operates that it can reduce the number of hospital days per thousand subscribers to the plan. I think the Family Health Plan should be seriously investigated by all of its Atismee thoas m 10 BOOKS. to AUR&HTTD goes moo kOU those people considering an alternative to their rising I believe health costs. FHP will become a major force in the health care of Utah once its subscribers recognize the value of preventive health care. And I believe that the physician community will accept the HMO Principle once it is recognized that economic opportunities are greater. Reform of our present health care system is long overdue. As we have seen from Senator Moss recent expose of Medicaid abuses, the prospects for an efficient national health care system are greatly diminished. The HMO in my mind offers the only real alternative. (See Utah Enterprise Review, Oct. 20, for article on Family Health Plan.) wotie 5 eom omAW ifmJT TO PE6K AT AID 0GC S- BEt,iee id SOP-- w AMERICAN) ARE7 FLSXlBL-S- : UU 1 isms to accepr it. ear roFLMKrr w &w- - fVdUC IS A TW4o-ocffmee l)S UU ID m 5 to MORAt- - siecrcme FUMCTIOi f who m w, m miOMi bot to a TO me? s-smsacz, s RECO&XS, m 4- 15 PART ALLY OFW ILLlTFRh'lE- - Kxme IT. Pragmatic Dogmatics Matheson and Taxes by Kent Shearer Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Scott Matheson leaves no doubt as to the tax policy he will, if elected, pursue. He has issued an eleven page position paper on the subject, which appeared in summary form in His the September 22 Deseret News. October 13 appearance before the Utah Taxpayers Association demonstrated that he continues to espouse it. Matheson forwards five proposals, of which two reduction of state inheritance tax and uniform statewide property assess- are relatively ment rates The same cannot be said of the other at best and three, which appear al. malevolent at worst. Of these, two would invade state income tax revenues that are constitutionally dedicated to public education. In one instance, Matheson would provide an income tax deduction or cash rebate for a certain proportion of sales tax paid on food. The other would provide a like deduction or i rebate for local property taxes paid by citizens over 65 years of age. Not only is it of questionable legality to so invade the public education trust fund, the invasions provided are invidious. Neither the sales nor the property tax deductions or rebates relate to the slightest to need. A rich doctor in Federal Heights or some other affluent area would receive the same sales tax treatment as would a iaborer on the West Side. Worse yet, if the doctor were 65 and the laborer 64, the doctor would get his property taxes back and the it is laborer would not. This is not equity arbitrariness of the worst sort. a three Mathesons final suggestion percent severance on gross proceeds from the sale of Utah coal may have surface Closer examination, however, appeal. demonstrates that half of that tax would be absorbed by Utah consumers, because it is they who use half of the coal. That means that the cost of electricity would go up for every household and business in the state. Moreover, the need coal-produc- ed for severance has not been demonstrated. That part which Matheson would allocate for State government would go to a land use planning unit strikingly similar to the one overwhelmingly rejected by the public in the 1974 referendum. Any need in energy impact areas for that portion Matheson would send the counties has been mitigated by Congressional passage of HR 9719 which, based on federal land ownership, will channel $323,679 to Emery, $165,000 to Kane and $322,340 to Uintah. What Matheson would have, in short, is not tax equity but rather a series of tax windfalls regardless of need and at the for expense of the average wage earner Those who may had no need therefore, and for state and local bureaucrats. All of which is about as arbitrary as railroad tariffs extracted from shippers by Mathesons employer, Union Pacific, which may prove that you can take the boy out of the railroad but it is far more difficult to take the railroad out of the boy. |