Nor is he your typical doctor, medical administrator, small business owner or individual insurance customer. It's his combination of experiences that led the recently retired Charlotte physician to create a blog that delves into the potential and problems of the Affordable Care Act.
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| Scherr |
Scherr says he's been interested in ways to rein in health care costs since his days in a private internal medicine practice in Atlanta in the 1980s, when HMOs were the rage. He volunteered to take part in one of the early "capitation" contracts, in which doctors are paid by the patient, rather than collecting a fee for each office visit, procedure and test.
About 20 years ago, he was part owner of a business with about 100 employees. There, he says, he learned the challenges of huge annual premium increases, which often meant switching providers and forcing employees to change doctors.
When he came to Charlotte, he worked as a hospitalist (a doctor who sees patients only while they're in the hospital) for Carolinas HealthCare System and got involved in administration of that group. And when he started thinking about retirement, he got an eye-opening look at what it would cost to buy his own insurance, an experience he writes about in a post titled "Obamacare and Me." This year he helped his two adult daughters buy insurance policies on the federal exchange created by the Affordable Care Act, and that's where he expects to get his own insurance (without subsidy) in 2015.
Scherr recently took the 30-hour training to become an ACA health insurance navigator; he has started volunteering with the nonprofit Enroll America. He's tapping that experience for a series of posts on the twists and turns of our nation's health insurance revolution.
A self-described liberal Democrat, Scherr writes that he was deeply disappointed by the compromise that won Congressional approval, modeled largely on conservative plans. But he says his interest now is on getting past the political rhetoric of the left and right to explore the reality of what's happening and what's to come. He writes that he sometimes feels like a Republican as he learns to value the free-market competition between insurance companies: "This competition will encourage, for the first time, health insurance companies to lower medical costs. If they have lower costs, they will be able to offer lower premiums, and thus receive a higher market share. ... All that’s needed now is to get Amazon involved in the health insurance delivery business, and the problem will be solved entirely."
Scherr says he hopes his blog will help people understand how to get better, less costly health care. He'd also like to encourage policymakers to join him in open-minded exploration.
"Republicans just want to vote to repeal the law, and Democrats don’t want to admit that there is anything in the law that needs to be changed," he writes. "There is more than enough blame to go around, and there are plenty of improvements that need to be made. Hello, Congress? Pay attention to your constituents! Get it together and do your job! Debate, argue, defend, parry – but at the end of the day, COMPROMISE and come up with some solutions that are not so fundamentalist in nature that only the hard-wingers on both sides are heard."