For years, health care activists pushing for adoption of a single-payer national health insurance plan as a means of reining in costs have used as a major argument: “The United States is the only industrial nation in the world without such coverage.”
Cape Cod business people are being reminded of this truth the hard way.
Several months ago, the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, with funding support from Cape Cod Healthcare, announced a new program to provide short-term health insurance for those foreign workers who throng to the Cape during the busy summer months. The project concentrated on Provincetown, but is available throughout the Cape.
The first marketing push to persuade the workers to sign on has not been a total success. According to Wendy Northcross, CEO of the Cape Cod Chamber, which is managing the program, “Foreign workers who have automatic health care coverage from their governments at home can’t seem to understand why they need to buy insurance in this country.”
Since they can’t change the laws, the Chamber and its two partner insurance companies—SITE USA of Florida and International Medical Group of Indiana—have followed an old American maxim, “If you can’t raise the bridge, lower the river.”
In other words, they’ve changed their marketing approach.
This new pitch is to convince local business owners to purchase this insurance for their employees and make it part of the compensation package.
According to Axel Baumann, Director of Business Administration for SITE USA, “The problem is that people from Jamaica and Eastern Europe are not quite used to having (to buy) health insurance, so we’re trying to reach out to employers to take care of their workers while they’re in this country.”
Mr. Baumann said there are three ways employers can approach this insurance problem:
They can deduct the premiums from the worker’s salary, they can offer to share the cost…or they can tell them to enroll themselves as a condition of employment.
It’s in the employers’ best interest to see that workers are covered, Mr. Baumann pointed out. “The Cape expects about 8,000 seasonal workers this year,” he predicted, “Even though these are mostly young people who think nothing will happen to them, there will be claims. And it’s not good for employers, or anyone, if a few hundred get ill.”
Not good for Cape Cod Healthcare, either, because there is no residence exception to its obligation to treat everyone who shows up needing care regardless of ability to pay even though the state now says it will not reimburse hospitals for treating non-residents from the free care pool.
The price of the policy is relatively low, too. Usually as little as $1.30 a day, according to Ms. Northcross.