Aetna Chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini said Thursday in a private meeting with his employees that the U.S. needs to have a debate about how a single-payer health system would be structured, including the possibility of administering the system by partnering with private insurers.
Bertolini raised doubts about whether the government should run the entire healthcare system, and alluded to a similar structure seen in Medicare Advantage or Medicaid Managed Care, which involves private companies.
“The government doesn’t administer anything,” he said in statements first reported by Vox. “The first thing they’ve ever tried to administer in social programs was [Obamacare], and that didn’t go so well. So the industry has always been the back room for government. If the government wants to pay all the bills, and employers want to stop offering coverage, and we can be there in a public private partnership to do the work we do today with Medicare, and with Medicaid at every state level, we run the Medicaid programs for them, then let’s have that conversation.”
“But if we want to turn it all over to the government to run, is the government really the right place to run all this stuff? And that’s the debate that needs to be had,” he said. “They could finance it, and if there is one financer, and you could call that single-payer.”
He also addressed rising medical costs, and noted that Democrats are pointing out that the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare doesn’t address the cost problem.
“We’re going to pay for it one way or another,” he said. “What we have to do is we have to get the costs right. We have to get people healthy. It’s not about who is paying the bill. It’s about what we’re doing to get the costs down.”
T.J. Crawford, Aetna spokesman, confirmed the comments and said in an emailed statement to Vox that Bertolini was not advocating for a single-payer system but was “encouraging debate while pointing out that public-private partnerships have been the backbone of the more successful government health care programs … In other words, partnering works when done the right way.”
