Dow Jones MarketWatch

Len Nichols in MarketWatch | "Health-Care Costs Take Growing Toll on U.S. Employers"

Communications — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:05:00 -0400

New America in the News:

Len Nichols, a health economist at the New America Foundation, was giving a talk in the Midwest recently when an employer asked him a question that went something like this: I can fight health-care costs by moving jobs overseas, but then who’s going to be able to buy my middle-class goods? As jobs disappear, so does access to affordable health insurance in many cases, and consumers grappling with less income and unstable coverage rightly pinch their pennies.

Nichols recounted this Catch 22-like story in a conference call Tuesday as he detailed a new study from the foundation. It describes how high health-care costs are putting U.S. employers at a significant competitive disadvantage compared with the health-care burden shouldered by other industrialized nations. The problem will get worse unless financing for health coverage starts to shift away from the employer-based model, Nichols said.

Employers are financing the costs partly out of profits, he said. “Fundamentally, they’re looking for relief, and that helps explain why they’re demanding some kind of reform in a serious way from the federal government.”

To be sure, workers do pay part of their employers’ higher health-care costs in lower wages, but that’s more of a long-term phenomenon than many experts have appreciated, Nichols said. “If employers could push this into wages they would, but every single year health-care costs grow faster than productivity,” wages and general inflation. Raising prices isn’t an option because countries such as China and India offer lower-price goods.

He figured if employers bore no burden and health-care costs just came out of workers’ wages, then why would employers continue to move jobs offshore, reduce health benefits’ generosity and increase employee cost-sharing? . . .

Len Nichols in Dow Jones MarketWatch | 'On the hook for health coverage'

Communications — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:18:00 -0500

New America in the News:

Many voters want mandatory insurance, employer role, yet candidates Differ (MarketWatch)
"Mandates make markets work better because they reduce the adverse selection risk significantly, and thereby enable you to do the kind of regulation the Democrats want to do to make the market fair," said Len Nichols, a health economist and director of the health policy program at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group in Washington.

"There's a lot of stuff that doesn't hang together if you don't have mandates. It's not that I love mandates. It's that I want the damn system to work." The ambition and specificity of the candidates' health proposals stands out compared with previous elections in 2004, 2000, 1996 and even 1992, Nichols said.

"You really only had then, I would say, a few candidates who made this a big issue: [Paul] Tsongas and then [Bill] Clinton," he said. "The scale of effort is equal to or greater than '92."

On the Republican side, Nichols said Sen. John McCain presents a more "nuanced" health reform proposal than his counterparts by focusing on tax credits and cost control. "McCain does better than the other Republicans, but he doesn't do as well as even Obama on the Democratic side. They focus on the group-type market as opposed to the individual market. Once you in essence make the individual market as attractive in the tax sense as the group market, then you chase the healthy individuals out of the group." ...

J.H. Snider on Microsoft's Wireless Prototype in Dow Jones Marketwatch

Communications — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 14:51:00 -0500

New America in the News:

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- When Microsoft Corp. delivers a mysterious prototype for government testing this coming week, it will mark a crucial juncture for a high-stakes bid to change the way consumers get their Internet access.

That bid has cast Microsoft and a group of powerful allies from Silicon Valley in the relatively unfamiliar role of Washington policy players.

Microsoft's (MSFT) prototype, delivered on behalf of the group, is a wireless device that could provide the public with free and more widespread access to the Web instead of relying on networks owned by big telecom and cable firms.

That breakthrough, tapping into an unused part of the nation's airwaves, is politically charged because it threatens to shift the Internet-access business away from telecom and cable companies that are historically well-connected in Washington, throwing open the field to a brand new batch of competitors.

It all hinges on how well the prototype performs in tests by the Federal Communications Commission. Microsoft and allies must prove that such devices, which can connect users via unlicensed portions of the nation's wireless spectrum known as white spaces, won't interfere with airwaves that major license holders acquired for large sums. While the FCC is obligated to protect license holders from such interference, several "white spaces" bills introduced in Congress have placed added pressure on the commission to wrap up the tests in a hurry.

But along the way, a host of big guns in the telecom industry hope Microsoft and its white-space cohorts will fail. The group includes Google Inc. (GOOG), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), Dell Inc. (DELL) and Intel Corp. (INTC).

"The telephone companies are terrified they'll lose 40% of their wireless minutes, because you'll be able to connect from work or home and bypass their wireless networks," said J.H. Snider, research director of the wireless future program at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based policy institute that has long advocated to allow use of white spaces...

For the complete article, please visit the Dow Jones Marketwatch website.