Mayo Clinic Recommends Universal Health Insurance Plan

The Mayo Clinic jumped into the national debate on improving health care yesterday, calling for every individual to have basic universal insurance as a step toward gradually replacing the current employer-based system.

But Mayo, in a proposal hammered out over 18 months by a panel of more than 400 health policy experts, is not advocating a government-run single-payer system. Instead, it suggested that private insurance companies be required to offer standard plans with many options, like the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan available to government workers.

Applicants for this insurance could not be turned down, under the Mayo plan.

The policies would be paid for by individuals, in some cases with help from employers. Lower-income people would get government help on a sliding scale.

Mayo, the big Minnesota-based physician and hospital group, is sending its recommendations to the presidential candidates and all members of Congress.

Coincidentally, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to offer her own health care proposals in a campaign speech scheduled for Monday.

“Mayo’s timing is pretty good; next year will be too late,” said Andrew Mekelburg, an executive in Washington for the big telecommunications company Verizon Communications, which spends $3.5 billion annually on health care for 900,000 employees, retirees and dependents.

Mr. Mekelburg, who took part in the Mayo project, said the recommendations had “a pretty good chance” of winning serious consideration from policy makers. “Mayo is extremely well respected,” he said.

Dr. Denis Cortese, the clinic’s chief executive, said that under the proposals, employees could keep their individual policies when they changed jobs, an important issue for workers. One in four changes jobs each year, and 47 million Americans of all ages do not have health insurance.

“It would be nice for our employees to have the portability feature, the freedom to move,” Dr. Cortese said. For the Mayo Clinic, which has 47,000 employees, “this would be an option we could live with very nicely,” he said.

Executives of several large employers who took part in the Mayo discussions agreed that rising medical costs and the aging of the baby boomer generation were pushing the current system toward a crisis. But they said they were not ready to abandon their current health plans for employees.

“We do not believe in relinquishing the employer-sponsored health care system,” said Anthony C. Wisniewski, a Mayo panelist who is executive director of health care policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce.

Linda M. Dillman, another participant, who is an executive vice president in charge of health and environmental issues at Wal-Mart, said health care should be a shared responsibility.

“The employer has a role to play,” she said. “The government has a role, especially for those who are financially unable to provide their own health care, and we think individuals also have a responsibility.”

Another Mayo panelist, Stuart M. Butler, said “Mayo understands that the era of traditional employer-sponsored insurance is ending and we need to think about the employer’s role evolving into a different model.” Mr. Butler is a health policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, a politically conservative research center in Washington.

Under the Mayo proposal, Mr. Butler said, “smaller employers would no longer sponsor coverage but would contribute to plans that their employees could select” from an outside insurer.

David Cutler, a Harvard economics professor who has advised Senator Barack Obama on health care issues, was another of the Mayo participants. He defended the idea of government subsidies for lower-income people. “Even someone with a $50,000 income would need help paying for insurance that now costs $11,000 or $12,000 a year,” Mr. Cutler said.

He noted that Mr. Obama and another Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, had both put forth health plans that would encourage individuals to join insurance purchasing groups and pool their buying power to get better coverage.

Another participant in the Mayo project, Helen Darling, the president of the National Business Group on Health, whose members are large employers, said her group would meet in Washington next month to discuss health care issues.

“Looking forward 5 to 10 years, most people agree that we don’t have a sustainable system,” she said. “What not everybody agrees on is the solution.”(Source: The New York Times)