Health Care Two Minutes

A few weeks ago I talked at a health care rally in Harrisburg. There were way too many speakers, so we all talked fast. I did this in about 2 minutes 5 seconds"

"My name is Alan Jacobs, I am the Senior Manager of Information technology at Isaac's Deli, Inc., headquartered in Lancaster. We operate 20 Isaac's Deli Restaurants in Central PA. We have 600 employees, and 150 covered under our health plan. We offer benefits to employees working 25 hours or more per week, which makes me very proud.
As an employer, I see the massive bureaucratic overhead caused by our health care funding system. The insurance game is a paper-pusher's paradise! Administration and overhead eats up 50 cents of every health care dollar.
And there are huge soft costs to an employer – time spent by the executive team to deal with the annual contracts, an HR department to take care of administration and COBRA, and strangely a Workers Comp contract that handles health care in a totally different way. But none of this has reduced costs or improved care.
This system, in which insurance companies compete to reduce costs for employers, isn't working. Our costs are double per person compared to other developed nations, and our health outcomes are worse.
Pennsylvania companies are competing in a global marketplace, in a battle that’s happening on the shelves at Home Depot and in the isles of Wagmans. There is health care cost in each of the products you in these stores, whether the products come from Costa Rica, Canada or Pennsylvania.
A single payer solution is our best chance to get rid of the administrative waste, get our workforce health and productive, and bring some economy to our health care funding system.
And this is the final play of our system: you get sick, you lose your job because you can’t work, you lose your health insurance, you can’t pay your health care bills and you go in to bankruptcy. It’s expensive, it’s brutal, and it’s wrong.

Alan Jacobs, Senior Manager of IT and Administration
Isaac's Deli, Inc., 354 N Prince St, Lancaster, PA 17603
717.394.0623
www.isaacsdeli.com