Linking Health Care to Economic Opportunity

Today I attended the 2009 Annual Hope Street Group Colloquium. The HSG is a bipartisan think tank focused on developing and implementing policies that promote economic opportunity - currently around the issues of education, health care reform, asset building, job creation and home ownership.

My role specifically is as a participant of the bipartisan working group on health care reform and adviser to the Economic Opportunity Index.

Economic Opportunity Index (EOI) | Hope Street Group

The EOI is a tool that policy makers, media and citizens can rely on to assess the potential impact of policies (such as health care reform) will have on economic opportunity for all Americans. The Index measures individual economic opportunity, as defined by "expected lifetime real income":
-Expected - luck, circumstance, and scoietal change always play a role in economic outcomes
-Lifetime - a single year might give a misleading snapshot of one's overall circumstances
Real - adjusted for inflation
-Income - economic, rather than non-economic opportunities such as freedom of expression

The EOI is an interesting tool that I think can really help policy makers quanitfy and measure economic opportunity change from policy reform. One of many challenges the Obama administration will have as the conversation heats up around health care reform is to explain to the public WHY health care reform is needed. I'm starting to come to the opinion that any health care reform in America will limit access (for those who already have access) in order to drive real meaningful cost control. If you limit access, you need to explain why they - and the entire system - will be better off. I have more thoughts on that, which I will post in the next few days.

Anyways, back to the EOI. The EOI looks at health care by determining what factors lead to better health - which implies more capacity for work and more productive working years. Some examples of factors are diabetes prevalence, worker absenteeism, violent crime rate, etc. So concretely, what if we increase access to health care from x% t o y%? How would that change what white women could earn?

As I listened to the conversations today, two things struck me. First, the need to sell health reform to the public - and I think the EOI can help push this. Secondly, if we decide to continue with employer based health care, then employers need more tools to understand how their employees' health can lead to more productivity. Large corporations - the Microsofts and GEs of the world - already get this, and are concerned about health care costs. However, the smaller companies need easier tools to allow them to quantify impact of improving health care on their worker productivity - because in addition to offering it as alternative compensation, employers provide health care to keep their employees productive.

Anyways, my role developing the health care portion of the EOI is just starting, but take a look, let me know what you think of the tool, and if there is anything you think is missing or can change. This is interesting for me since I have always looked at health care in isolation - how do you drive quality, contain costs and increase access - but this is the first time that I'm pushing myself to connect health care to larger macro and microeconomic phenomenon.

Over the course of the week I'll continue to post thoughts from the colloquium itself.