Posted by
john on Saturday, December 06, 2008 7:44:43 PM
That's the description William McGurn offered for GM in his WSJ column last week. Though this epithet is in no way Mr. McGurn's original material, he's to be congratulated on some very original thinking regarding a very old automaker issue - legacy costs in the form of health care obligations. The scope of the problem? GM "provides health care benefits for a million people today - only a fraction of their actual workers."!
McGurn's idea? Offload responsibility from employer to employee, using the hot new formula of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) plus low-cost catastrophic coverage. Unquestionably, this would reduce costs for everyone. Why? Massive efficiencies to be gained by giving more control over spending decisions to consumers, who would not be "at the mercy of business managers and union leaders who agree to cut health benefits as part of a corporate rescue".
Moreover, as McGurn notes, this would not only benefit workers, and obviously auto companies (which would be liberated to act less like health care companies), but also those American workers who have no health coverage at all, yet who would be, under any bailout, "taxed to fulfill the generous promises made to the UAW".
The Quixotic McGurn challenges Rick Waggoner to use his platform before congress this week to encourage the membership to grease the wheels for such a transition. Alas, this is about as likely as Congress altering CAFE standards, another sure-fire way to aid Detroit sans bailouts.