Marketplace of Ideas Blog

As you know, President Obama is visiting Green Bay Thursday to hold a town hall meeting on health care.

With that in mind, The NEW Adventures of Nicolet blog gives an annotated history of health care in the Green Bay area. (The capitalization is the original blogger’s.)

In the 80s and 90s, Green Bay was the Center of the Health Insurance Universe. Back in the Day, we led the World in designing, selling and servicing some very, very innovative health insurance benefit plans for small business owners and their employees. The proof of our success was in ALL the Sales we made - we drove the competition absolutely crazy.

Not only were our plans good, they were priced right! It takes 3 things to sell health insurance: Rates. Rates. Rates... We were a low-cost provider with OUTstanding customer service and lots of BIG ideas! We set the bar VERY high from lil old Green Bay.

Thousands, and thousands became employed - and trained - in a highly technical industry; and there were countless spin offs, mergers, vendors and health-related wannabee businesses taking root on the Tundra, too. Agents and customers from around the country constantly flew in to see what all the fuss was about. About 100% of the time they'd go home totally impressed with our knowledge, our craftsmanship and our work ethic.

So what is health care really about?

Five years ago, my company was leading a huge initiative for UnitedHealthcare. We hosted a series of Town Hall-type meetings with: "The Primary Healthcare Decision Maker in Your Household." And just like the President, we launched our initiative in Green Bay. (We eventually moved beyond the Tundra to other towns and halls.)

Guess what The Number ONE Healthcare Issue is for The Primary Healthcare Decision Maker? "Well, DUH!," one said,
"The Cost!"

It didn't take a Town Hall Meeting to discover THAT! It's always about the Money, isn't it?

That is “Gene” Nicolet’s advice. Even though not everyone agrees that health care spending, at least globally speaking, is a problem, one could conclude that one of the problems with health care is that, in a third-party-payer model such as ours, the fact that those who are paying for (most of) health care and those who are using health care are not the same people.

My advice on what to do about health care comes from the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm.