ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Erin Bruns and Bruce Luttrell are the co-owners of Bruce's Burritos in Yarmouth.
GRAY — My husband and I own and run a restaurant in Yarmouth, and we are extremely concerned about the lack of affordable health care and insurance for our employees and ourselves.
If we ran our small business the way a health insurance company operates, we'd have to close our doors.
Bruce and I worked for years to be able to open our own restaurant, a place that we could run in a fair and equitable way while serving delicious and nutritious food. We care about our employees and endeavor to help them get ahead in life.
Bruce and I don't want to make 50 times what our lowest-paid employee does, one of the first ways in which we do not resemble an insurance company. We want to be able to give our hardworking employees a decent living wage that will help them to live comfortable, healthy lives.
Unfortunately, even with our full-time employees making well above minimum wage, none of them can afford insurance. And what if they could? Bruce and I have a laughable policy ourselves, and even in the case of a catastrophe I'm not confident I'd get coverage.
In the restaurant business, as in most businesses, it is competition that keeps you great. I know that if I don't provide a good meal at a reasonable price, people will not come back.
In many cases, health insurance companies don't face this fundamental business concern. Employers decide what health care plans their employees can subscribe to, and health insurance companies decide how much to charge in a nearly arbitrary fashion while also arbitrarily dismissing people's claims. In this process there is often little or no oversight or recourse for the average person.
If I ran my business this way, I would charge different individuals at different rates, give them different levels of service, and, if I felt like it, after they paid I would reserve the right to deny them a burrito because I had someone else offering me more money.
In the current health care system, getting medical care often means running around to a parade of different specialists, with no one doctor coordinating everything. Just the paperwork is exhausting, calling the insurance company about every referral and finding out that none of it is covered or what is covered is so negligible as to be ridiculous. If I ran my restaurant that way, I'd hand you a tortilla and send you across town for your rice and beans, and to another place for your salsa and so forth.
In the health care system, doctors get paid according to how much they do, not how well they do it or whether it makes anyone healthier. That means there aren't strong incentives to provide cost-effective, efficient care, and those who order more procedures make a bigger profit.
In the burrito biz that would mean we could just add on what we think the customer wants; surely she wants guacamole for $15 extra, and if I don't think that she has ordered enough for her family, I'll just throw in two more quesadillas for $30. If I liked, I could run up the price further by charging them for each grain of rice, for me to take CEO golf vacations.
No matter how you look at it, any business that tried to run the way health care is set up would close its doors almost immediately. Consumers wouldn't tolerate these sky-high prices, rampant inefficiencies and customer abuses without walking out.
But while I've got competitors, in the health care system right now we don't have enough options to force the insurers to get better.
I've been struggling with health care for 10 years, and I'm sick of it. Now is the time for action, and Sen. Olympia Snowe in particular needs to stay strong on this issue by building on the best parts of her Senate Finance Committee bill.
The final product needs to reduce costs, cut red tape and, yes, provide a public option to introduce some real competition to every market. No one will get everything they want in the end but, as the senator herself...
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