Prosperity Issue: Health Care

Ohio’s employers urge state leaders and policymakers to view spiraling health care costs as a serious economic development and competitiveness issue.

We must find ways to stem the rising cost of employer-provided health care coverage for Ohio workers and their families. We must change government policies and regulations that needlessly contribute to the skyrocketing cost of providing health care services, while rejecting new mandates and proposals that will drive up the cost of health insurance premiums and ultimately lead to increased numbers of uninsured Ohioans.

To achieve these objectives, Ohio must consider bold structural changes rather than simply tweaking the existing health care system. Policy priorities in the healthcare arena include the following:

• Explore and support flexible, free-market, consumer-driven approaches to providing health care savings accounts, rather than mandates for employer-provided benefit plans such as requiring coverage for care and treatment of mental illness or requiring employers to fund specific levels of coverage.
  
  
• Enable small employers to pool their collective risk for the purpose of purchasing group health insurance for their employees.
  
  
• Empower health care consumers to become more discerning consumers by promoting more sharing of reliable health care quality and cost data.
  
  
• Promote wellness and healthy lifestyles by all health care consumers.
  
  
• Fully implement the Medicaid managed-care model.
  
  
• Reject any proposals for a government-run, single payer health system.