National Association of Health Underwriters
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Plan StatusHealthy Access recommendations issued.Number of People CoveredAll Americans.
Estimated CostNot addressed.
Payment Scheme NAHU believes that many of its Healthy Access recommendations (e.g., encouraging wellness and preventions, pay for performance, health IT) will reduce health care costs. However, recognizing that additional public funds will be needed, NAHU recommends taxes and fees on unhealthy goods and activities: tobacco, alcohol, high-fat and high-sugar foods, and guns and ammunition. Other funding should be derived from a broad base and might include assessments on hospital stays and a national lottery whose proceeds would be devoted to health care uses. |
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Plan in Brief
- NAHU exists to help its members—more than 20,000 insurance agents, brokers, consultants, and benefits professionals—guide their clients’ health insurance choices and enrollment.
- NAHU supports preservation of employer-based coverage as well as expanded offerings to individuals and the self-employed and expanded access to certain public programs.
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Impact on Federal Government
- Recommends that the federal government require states to offer high-risk pools.
- Recommends that the federal government help fund high-risk pools and help fund subsidies to low-income and elderly residents.
- Recommends that the federal government be required to offer wellness and prevention in all health programs.
Impact on States
- Recommends that states be required to offer wellness and prevention in all health programs.
- Would streamline Medicaid and SCHIP to reduce uncompensated care.
Impact on Insurers
- Recommends maintaining and strengthening the private insurance market to provide wider coverage choices and reinsurance options.
- Recommends easier and more affordable reinsurance, to ultimately lower premiums.
- Recommends that states create environments to encourage private markets.
Impact on Providers
- Recommends raising Medicare/Medicaid/SCHIP payments to the same reimbursement levels in the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan.
- Supports medical malpractice limits.
- Supports pay for performance, evidence-based medicine, and best practices to reduce errors and increase efficiency.
- Encourages price transparency.
Impact on Employers
- Supports employer-based insurance and the tax deductions that accompany it.
- Encouraged to offer wellness and prevention programs to employees.
Impact on Individuals
- Recommends universal coverage.
- Recommends guaranteed access.
- Supports consumer-driven health care.
- Supports prevention efforts.
- Recommends extended tax deductions to individuals and the self employed.
Proponents/Opponents
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Many groups and individuals concur with NAHU about the benefits of consumer-driven health care and extending tax credits to individuals and the self-employed; these are methods to control costs and to extend health care coverage, they say. http://www.chcchoices.org/about.html
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Say that the private insurance agency is the real source of the health care problem—the costs of health care overall include private health care fees, the requisite beaurocracy further increases costs, and the industry’s business efforts mean that high-risk patients can’t get coverage or must pay higher premiums for it. http://www.pnhp.org
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For Further Reading and Listening
About NAHU
Connector Plans: Legal and Economic Analysis of Health Insurance Exchange Mechanisms
NAHU Comments to the Citizens’ Health Care Working Group
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Key Targets for Investment • Health IT.
• Health Savings Accounts.
• Disease management.
• Consumer-driven health care.
Notable Feature
- NAHU is studying health connector plans, such as the one in place in Massachusetts; NAHU believes that depending on legislation and other details such plans could prove to be either innovative mechanisms for expanding insurance choice or taxpayer-subsidized competition for the insurance industry.
Experts' Comments“Right now, most Americans receive their health insurance through their workplace as part of their compensation, and the government helps employers provide health insurance with a tax break. This tax break has enabled the development of a private health insurance market that provides good coverage to the majority of Americans. Most Americans can get insurance through their employer, thanks to the tax break.
Millions of Americans can’t, however. Their employer might not — or cannot — offer insurance. Or they might be self-employed. These people — waitresses and construction workers, students and day care workers, small business owners and self-employed entrepreneurs — have to buy health insurance on their own.
A person who buys insurance as an individual should be treated just as well as a person who buys insurance through an employer. The President’s proposal would ensure that whether you buy health insurance through your workplace or buy it on your own, you get the same tax treatment.”
--Tevi Troy, Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services, speaking at the NAHU Capitol Conference, February 4, 2008
“No country can long afford a health care system run by private health insurance companies. They take 15 to 30 percent for their fees (and add 15 percent to the administrative costs of physicians and hospitals); refuse to insure the sick, disabled, chronically ill and elderly; and generally distort the health care delivery system for their own profit.”
--Dr. Bill Roy, The Wichita Eagle, March 30, 2008
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Interest Groups 
