GM on a crash course with health care costs

[OhioChick]

12-YEAR STRUGGLE A BAD OMEN FOR NATION
By Ron French
MediaNews
Posted on Sun, Oct. 01, 2006

Bruce Bradley grew up in the 1950s. He remembers when every week in darkened movie houses another giant spider or fire-breathing lizard would threaten the world. Despite the best efforts of the military and bright minds, every kid in the audience knew there was no stopping the monster.

Today, the 61-year-old wages his own war on a monster in a Pontiac, Mich., office building. There, some of General Motors' best minds fight a losing battle against the bills for Nexium prescriptions, heart bypass surgeries and CT scans that flood in at a rate of $10,000 a minute.

Bradley gets a cup of coffee, and GM has spent $50,000 on health care. He goes to lunch, and $600,000 is gone. He takes a three-day weekend on his sailboat and returns to $43 million in medical bills.

For 12 years, Bradley, GM's director of health care policy, and the corporate soldiers in the automaker's health care war room have waged an unprecedented battle against health care costs, throwing more money, time and energy into the issue than any company in history.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/15654140.htm

[Warpy]

1. All corporations are on a collision course with health care costs

and this may be why we either get single payer or corporations get laws passed to get them out from under (without raising wages) and the whole system is allowed to collapse first.

Corporation "personhood" is a psychopathic one, so I imagine it will be the latter.

[flyingfysh]

2. GM's biggest problem is brain-dead management

They keep insisting on producing SUVs and Hummers, when everyone knows the world is going in the Prius direction. And people wonder why GM is losing money?

What is it about the decision-making process at GM that keeps making them do stupid things?

[valerief]

4. I thought the *Big 3* were grown by oilmen to increase demand for

oil. So gas-guzzlers are in line with their goal to sell more oil.

[notadmblnd]

3. I thought GM just paid premiums on the policys

They actually write checks for the bills? As a person who recieves survivors benifits via GM, on the rare occasion we use a Dr., my health care invoices come from BCBS, not GM. How confused am I?

[justgamma]

6. Our company was

self insured, but the benefits were administered by an insurance company. In other words, we paid the medical bills and paid the insurance company to keep track and write the checks.

[SharonAnn]

9. They're self-insured. They pay the bills themselves.

They may have another company handle the paperwork.

[Pharaoh]

5. This is what deregulation has brought

Ever increasing drug and insurance costs, not to mention energy and interest rates.........

The fox is guarding the hen house and until we fix that problem things will continue to spiral out of control.

I only hope it's not too late.

Greedy Bastards!!

[leesa]

7. Well, he needs to blame his greedy buddies in Big Pharma and the insurance

industries...and maybe he needs to work harder insted of taking so many breaks and 3 day weekends on his saiboat. GM is going for re-organization to cut benefits. That's why they don't care if they go broke making Hummers.

[msgadget]

8. If anyone in power really cared about a 'free market'

and allowed our companies to compete on equal footing with other countries...Toyota didn't have to worry about healthcare and neither do the countries we've outsourced the rest of our manufacturing to. It's just odd that a country so enamored of big business won't even mention this as a way to bolster its remaining industries.