The Anti-Manichaeist

But its employees without adequate healthcare are my neighbors. You can read a good summary of the recent article in the NYTIMES about an important memo that has emerged at TPMCafe. The Memo shows that Walmart wants to contain its benefits costs and plans to get rid of “cross-subsidization” (yes, the memo actually uses the word) — of spouses, of the old, of the sick. It also emerges that about 46% of the children of Walmart employees are either without healthcare or on tax-payer funded public healthcare.

I’m not an expert on health-care, but I’ve had opportunities to listen to healthcare experts like Frank Sloan, who is part of the center for Health-Policy Management at Duke University. Sloan is a practical health economist, whose devotion to improving health-care practice stems in part from his Christianity, as also may be his methodological humility in outlining for others the tentative nature of assumptions needed for much cost-benefit analysis. He also, like this year’s Nobel Prize recipient Schmoller, is quite open to learning from other disciplines when they can contribute to a better understanding of the problems faced in doing research. He was the editor of a book, Valuing Health Care : Costs, Benefits, and Effectiveness of Pharmaceuticals and Other Medical Technologies. My general impression I got from him during a seminar he gave in Mexico at my university was that there are ways to measure what the cost of various health services should be and to check the influence of HMOs and Doctors on what the price of their services are, making the public provision of healthcare less expensive.

We don’t need a Canadian Health Care system, but we can cross-subsidize much of the healthcare costs for our population. As implied above, it would definitely be a way to love our neighbors.

dlw