Buckle up: George Will Peers into the Future

If George Will had his way, corporate benefits would be tailored with a simple concept in mind: People are responsible for their own health.

This should not come as a surprise to fans of the renowned libertarian-conservative political commentator and author. As one of the keynote speakers at the BenefitsPRO Broker EXPO conference, Will did not say personal responsibility should be the singular guiding star for benefits decisions. But he said the American people have to be told that they are responsible for keeping themselves healthy.

Will made clear that he is a huge fan of health savings accounts: “We have to give Americans more skin in the game. They have to have more at stake. I hope health savings accounts are the future.” He also painted an overarching picture of the background against which corporate benefits decisions will be made in coming years.

Consider the deficit. There is a permanent powerful incentive for the political class to run deficits, he explained. “What we are doing is something new in American history. … We are now borrowing from the future, not for the future but to finance our own current consumption of goods and services.” Meanwhile, our IOUs in the form of entitlements are stacking up. Low interest rates will keep the worst scenarios at bay, but how long can rates stay low? “We get away with ‘so far, so good’” only for so long, Will said.

“The biggest problem and unknown is modern healthcare,” he said. In the 1900s, he said, medicine was so small a part of the American economy that if we had statistics, it wouldn’t even have been measured. “Now healthcare is a massive employer. If you look at Cleveland, the largest employer is a healthcare clinic. If you look at Houston, you think energy capital, but the largest employer there is Texas hospitals.”

Will noted that in 1900, 33 percent of all deaths were from infectious diseases. “Before Covid-19, only 2 percent were from it.”

Every day between now and 2030, he noted, 10,000 more baby boomers retire into the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security system. “The average healthcare cost for an 85-year-old is five times higher than the average cost for a 55-year-old. Longevity is a great social achievement but it is also tremendously expensive.”

Another key turning point in the last century was the linkage between employment and health insurance, he said. In the 1940-to-1941 labor shortage, Congress passed wage and price controls, he explained. Businesses couldn’t compete by increasing labor, so they offered healthcare with untaxed compensation. Fast-forward to today when you go to the doctor and he or she wants to give you a certain test. Most people never ask how much it will cost. “Partly because they don’t care and partly because the doctor himself or herself doesn’t know. We don’t have a particularly functioning market.”

Will believes in a profit system because it concentrates the mind. “The idea of a healthcare system without pricing makes an irrational system more so.” However the internet, Will said, provides glimmers of a viable alternative. “There are more visits to webMD these days than there are visits to doctors. People are using this information, and there should be ways to structure healthcare around this by giving people an incentive to not use the healthcare system so much.”

These are thorny issues Will touches on, and most of the legislative and administrative attempts to address them have ultimately failed. For benefits administrators hoping that Washington, now united under the Democrats, will finally be able to provide some relief, Will has some unpleasant news: Until there are term limits, legislators will not think of the next generation, he said. “Sooner or later—and this is what I fear—interest rates are going to rise. Interest rates today are essentially negative. And when they rise, we will spend more on debt service than we are spending on education. More than we are spending on defense. The debt is stored up and waiting for us.”

From: BenefitsPRO