Doing healthcare reform right: Safeway

THIS is how you ACTUALLY lower healthcare costs: by tying them to people's choice! Safeway CEO Steven Burd writes in the Wall Street Journal that his company's policy of financially rewarding workers who don't smoke, maintain a healthy weight, and otherwise cost less to insure has paid off in terms of lowering healthcare costs for the company. In fact, Burd would like to offer more behavioral incentives to his employees -- the $312 he is allowed by law to pay each worker for not smoking is far less than the $1,400 extra it costs to insure a smoker vs a nonsmoker, so he'd like to make that incentive even bigger to get more employees on the wagon.

As Burd says, Safeway's ideas are not new; they're borrowed from the auto insurance industry, which does not require good drivers to pay more to subsidize payouts for bad drivers. As with driving a car, one's health is in large part under one's direct control. Why shouldn't the market reflect that by rewarding those who take responsibility for their health and punishing those who don't?

It's ironic that the same liberals who want to force "predatory lenders" to have more "skin in the game" -- that is, more of their own money at risk -- don't think the same way about health. It certainly doesn't seem to bother many Americans that their literal skin (and internal organs, and teeth, and eyes, etc.) is in the game when it comes to taking care of their health. Why shouldn't each of us have some financial skin in the game as well? And why wouldn't insuring everybody at the same price, regardless of health conditions, encourage self-destructive behavior?