East Bay Business Times, July 13, 2007

From laissez-faire economics to socialism, a health care reform forum sponsored by the California Women's Leadership Association Bay Area Chapter July 10 presented five disparate but perhaps not so irreconcilable views.

Five health care policy experts in a discussion moderated by KQED journalist Belva Davis seemed to agree that getting people to change unhealthy behaviors, like smoking and eating high-fat foods. were key to containing America's health care costs. currently accounting for 16 percent of the Gross Domestic Product.

"You pick up a chronic disease every decade of your life and then you die." said Wanda Jones, a health care consultant and president of the New Century Healthcare Institute. "Forty-five percent of people in health plans account for 70 percent of the expenditures."

The biggest disagreements - not surprisingly - revolved around who should make decisions about our health care system and who should pay On opposite sides of the spectrum were Helen Halpin, professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. and an unpaid adviser to the campaign of presidential candidate Barack Obarna, and Sally Pipes, president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, who as a side note recently played an unwitting cameo role in Michael Moore's film Sicko after he used a clip of her appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor."

Pipes advocates for a free-market, consumer- driven approach to health care, where health savings accounts are tax deducible in every state, insurance is portable and not tied to employment and people are free to join insurance pools. Halpin wants a single-payer system that would also give people the choice to remain with their current insurance, or make the switch.

The biggest reaction, however, came when Ruth Liu, associate secretary for health policy at California's Health and Human Services Agency spoke about the plan's "shared responsibility'' component, which also includes having physicians and hospitals pay into the system. Liu argued that providers would get far more back under the plan. For instance, physicians would pay 2 percent of their gross revenues but Medi-Cal reimbursements would also increase by $4 billion under the plan, among other things. Also important to the discussion were questions about whether all individuals would sign up for mandatory health insurance, if they could be trusted to make their own health care decisions and how in the scale of things reality would contrast with grand plans.

Jones, who advocates the health care industry to undertake its own reform. worried that any government proposal would be short-sighted and. in California, influenced by union interests.