Episode 1- Welcome to Richard Helppie's Common Bridge

The problems we have in the country are solvable, but not solvable the way we’re approaching them today, because of partisan politics.  The discussions here are designed to find a place in the middle where common sense discussions can bridge the current great divide.

Richard Helppie is a ​is a successful entrepreneur in the technology, health and finance space.  He and his wife Leslie are also philanthropists with interests in civic and artistic endeavors but with a primary focus on medically and educationally underserved children.  

Brian Kruger is the show's moderator and host. 

Transcript

Brian Kruger: 0:06

Welcome to the podcast. The common bridge with Richard Helppie. Rich is a successful entrepreneur in the technology, health and finance space. He and his wife Leslie are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors, but with a primary focus on medically and educationally underserved children. My name is Brian Kruger and from time to time I'll be the moderator and host of this podcast

Richard Helppie: 0:31

problems that we have in the country are solvable and they're probably not solvable the way we're approaching them right now through partisan politics. Mmm. I've spent a good deal of time in healthcare, familiar with the legislation and I'm familiar with past practice and there are some things that we need to do as a country that folks don't want to touch. And central to this is the notion of employer provided health insurance. Um, it really doesn't make sense in today's economy at all. Um, in fact, it is a, uh, uh, artifact of a 1945 rule when there were wage and price controls and you couldn't give people salary increases, but you could provide them benefits on a tax free basis.

Speaker 3: 1:26

That's interesting, rich and I wanted to ask you straight out because you're one of the first guys I've ever known that actually has their arms around the, uh, the origins of this because people think that, well, it's a right, must've been around for a long time and you can snap a chalk line. I wanted to start, there's a reason that it starts and people start thinking, well, the government is going to have some sort of play in my own personal health care. And you've, you've mentioned 1945. It's a postwar thing. Is that correct?

Richard Helppie: 1:50

It is. And the tax treatment, let's start there. Um, it's inherently unfair how so? You have two people living next to each other. Chris has a very well funded health plan. It's worth$30,000 a year. A lot of first dollar coverage, extensive benefits, great provider network pays zero taxes next door to Chris's Pat. Pat has a very meager plan. It has very high deductibles. It doesn't have as extensive of a network. There are longer wait times. It's worked on the market about$8,000. Pat pays zero income tax on that. So let's start there. Now, one of the arguments you're going to hear, in fact you've heard frequently, and you'll hear it during this 2020 debates ad nauseum, is that people like their employer provided healthcare, and you'll hear the big health plan saying it's a very efficient market that takes care of 180 million Americans. What they leave out is that if a person becomes too ill to work, then they're no longer in the pool and the cruelty of at the point you most need your health insurance, you lose. It is patently cruel. It's absurd. It's not justifiable. What if you're fortunate enough to get through your work life, become aged, where you are going to consume more healthcare services? Then what happens? You're out of that pool as well. So it doesn't make sense. The otherness steeped in irony, isn't it? I mean, right when it comes to play, you're out of it. It does. It does. It makes no sense. Look when my grandfather who came to Detroit in the depression started in the mail room at Chrysler corporation and some 40 years later retired as a, um, executive rank in the financial services part of Chrysler getting his insurance from Chrysler kind of made sense. And now when you think about the gig economy and workers taking on assignments for a period of weeks or a period of months, and you have the employment rules saying what constitutes and employee and all these big employers are trying to find ways to avoid calling someone an employee so they don't have to provide health insurance. It, it, it makes no sense. And so you think the health insurance is the main component of not wanting to be an FTE is that the biggest lift is a pension and healthcare pension seems to be moving on to 401k anyway. But healthcare, was this the last standing beasts? They're right. Precisely. So, so think about this. Um, I've had the honor of being married for a very long time and during that entire time of our marriage, decades, we have had one company that ensures our cars. And here's the way they look at it. They take in premium from us, they have time to invest those premiums so that when we make claims they can pay the premiums. We had four kids, all four of our kids hit something. Thankfully nothing major, but they serviced those claims because they knew on the other side of that claim there was another premium stream if they could take care of me as a customer. And so they've enjoyed a 40 year relationship and we've enjoyed a 40 year relationship. They win the gamble though the well in this case. And they've got a big enough risk pool to, to, to uh, work that out. But it's structured correctly. Now let's look at healthcare. And the last stats I saw, and I think they've gotten worse since then, is that the average American has their health plan about 21 months. And the reason is people change jobs. The employer shops the plan, the plan gets canceled. And so now if you're the insurer on the other side, you're taking in premium, you don't really have time to invest it to pay claims because you're not going to have that relationship when a claim comes in, there's not an incentive to service that claim because there's not a premium stream on the other side. And this happened to me personally, by the way. Um, and so their machinery is set up to say we're not going to pay the claim and they've got a lot of machinery to deny that claim. It isn't that sort of protocol now is that something comes in initially reject it and then you need to prove to me why a lot of no's before. Yes, right, exactly. And it's structured that way and you can see the economic incentive, but we need to liberate health insurance, which is a longitudinal need from employment, which is not a longitudinal need when it comes to health insurance. It doesn't make any sense to get it from the employer. And as an employer it's a nightmare. It's a headache and it's something you really can't meet everyone's needs. Now if you want to look at this from an ideological standpoint, on one side there is, Hey, you know what? The government provides everything and it's illegal for anyone else to provide like services or like insurances on the other side. It's government doesn't provide anything and let the free market do it. Now I don't think either of those is the approach, but if you had to pick one or the other, you might want to have with the appropriate rules about shall issue in preexisting condition. Sell it the way you sell car insurance. All right, longterm relationships. Take good care of me, service my claims. You're going to continue to keep my business going to continue to keep my premiums the I think the right way to do this though is to face the fact that we've tried to put a patch on a patch, on a patch, on a patch, on a patch, and there's a comes a time when you have to just look at the structurally. So what I would propose is just a few things would solve the whole problem. Firstly, for all of the wonderful hacks supported healthcare that we have, Medicare, Medicaid, chip, tri care, even the VA consolidate all those bureaucracies and all that spend into one universal system. Everybody gets that you're a citizen of the United States, you get it. And that would be managed centrally. Uh, uh, government, uh, uh, regulated, uh, government provided health insurance. Everybody gets that plan. It's paid for. Everybody pays something and perhaps someone at the bottom of the income scale pays$50 a year and maybe someone at the top pays$25,000 a year. You put it right onto the 10 40 and you, that's how you raise the money for it. And you consolidate all those bureaucracies all by the way, whom will defend themselves and get it down to one single spent. That's one layer. Now everybody's got something. Next, you allow a private insurance market with the appropriate controls about shall issue and not denying on preexisting conditions or on a genetic for people that want to buy faster access, that want to buy more choice, that want to buy more innovation. Isn't that that component sort of exist today? Yes, I mean you could walk out and go, look, I've got a big bag of money and I'm going to go somewhere and go like, I'm going to pay for it. Really good health insurance. There's lots of ways to do that and if you look at every centralized system around the world, there is a secondary market and everybody that has the resources buy something on the secondary market and they do that to avoid wait times. They do that so they can get more advanced care. Of course they always happen, right? It is. And and people like to point to Canada and frankly Canada system works well because they have the United States next door as their secondary insurance and all of my, I had many thousands of hospital clients and all of them on the border and in the Sunbelt, we're all set up to take in Canadian patients who had insurance, if they didn't want to wait the months for their knee surgery or their hip surgery or their heart surgery, they came to the United States and let the market innovate. I mean, if somebody points to a podcast or a device that the central government invented to let us have conversations like this, then great, but look where the innovations come from. They come from the private sector, uh, solving something yet distribution's not great. Right? And you can't, and I'm, uh, I'm of the belief that, um, we have all the resources in the country to provide some level of care and that's where that first light comes from. The third thing I would do if, uh, if I, if it was possible tomorrow, I'd make everybody eligible for Medicare part D Medicare part D covers drugs. Uh, it's a fair fight. It pits the insurance companies against the pharmaceutical companies that there's no copay with D Oh, there's copay. There's, but you pick, you pick, um, the Medicare part D is a been a stunning success. Um, 95% subscriber satisfaction still. Uh, it is running 40% below the cost projections. And how did they get there? They made it insurance. If a person or when a person becomes eligible for Medicare, you don't have to sign up for part D, but if you wait until you now have drug needs, the ketchup premium is really steep. So it attracts in the 80% of the people that are only going to use 20% of the services and provides enough funding for the 20% that are going to use 80% of the spent. And by the way, this isn't an idea that was invented in the good old USA. The Australia national system uses something very, very similar and it works really well. How long do you think that's been going on in Australia? I'm not familiar with that. I don't know how long Australia's had that, but worked out the kinks yet. I mean, Oh, well they're all aware. We start paying in when you're 19. Really? Yeah. And you don't have to, but if you wait till you're 28, it's a lot of money to get in. So it's a, it's true insurance. Um, and then the fourth leg that I'd put on this would be a very simple tax. The benefits. All right. If you're, remember the origins, the origins was, I can't give you wages, so I'm going to give you this health insurance. It has monetary value. I guarantee you give somebody a, on their W2, they made$45,000 a year in wages and they made$25,000 a year in health insurance benefits. Now they're gonna start paying attention to utilization. They're going to start paying attention to what's in that plan. They're going to work to bring the costs down. And you could phase that in over five years. And before you ask, I'll tell you, if there's all of those four things that I outlined, what would be the key, the catalyst to actually get us on the right course? The key would be to start taxing the benefits. You could do that, phase it in 20% a year over the next five years. You think that gets, that gets somebody's attention. It, it starts to put the economics down into the very powerful free enterprise engine that we have and it lets consumers make choices and creates the moral hazard of consumption. Um, uh, prior to, um, utilizing services. Now, I want to make sure before I leave that topic though, that there's two sides of the coin about utilization. So the tools of copayments and deductibles were used to pro somewhat prevent the, you know, capricious use of health. And it does work and healthcare utilization does come down, but they've also found that it comes down inappropriately. People don't get the needed care because they don't want to have to pay the deductible or don't want to have to pay the copay. I see. And so that, that is a, um, a real hazard. Yeah. But comes a block. But if, again, if you start taxing somebody for that$25,000 plan, you're not saying you can't have it. You're just saying it's compensation. You're going to pay taxes on that. We'd really get this looked at.

Speaker 3: 15:24

Cool. All right. I'm gonna shift gears a little bit and I know you, you've been a, you have a long history of supporting incentive-based, uh, based, uh, education, uh, mentor programs. Veer off of that even a little bit too. I just want to take a look at, uh, just general landscape of, of today's public education. Um, I think it was John Adams early on, uh, and the founding fathers made education a priority and said, you know, we do need to educate our young, and I paraphrase greatly. Uh, we're, we're at a stage now where it seems to be failing at a lot of levels. Uh, can you speak a little bit to maybe, um, how that's changed and maybe not a four step program, but if you get to wave the magic wand, I know you think about this stuff a lot. Um, well, where would you go if it was like, we're all gonna listen to Richard, help you here for a little while and, and here's, here's his ideas on the direction of helping education today.

Speaker 4: 16:22

Well,

Richard Helppie: 16:24

I think many people would agree that one of the wisest and most accomplished Americans was Abraham Lincoln

Speaker 4: 16:32

and Abraham Lincoln

Richard Helppie: 16:35

was said to do his homework with a piece of coal on a shovel on the hearth by firelight. So let's not do that. Let, let's move. Let's move to the future. And I first want to step back and talk about how absolutely vital education is

Speaker 4: 16:59

and the

Richard Helppie: 17:03

of our country relies on it and an educated populace and an educated pipe. So let's take a fictional character, a childless miser with a harder stone. We'll call him rich. I, I, well, let's think of another name. I think. I think Dick is, might've said Ebeneezer or something. But anyway, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this fictional person is working in a, let's say they're making a medium wage and they've been frugal and they've saved their money and their plan is to retire and rely on social security and Medicare to supplement pension. Okay, that's the plan. Why should they be concerned about education? Well, let's examine that. What makes up their pension? It's investments in companies. Well, who's working at those companies? It's the kids that are in school right now and the kids that are about to be born that are going to go attend those schools. How good are those companies going to be if that workforce is an educated, so how good is the pension going to be? And similarly the social security payments which come from the current workforce. If you want to have enough money in there to take out, you have to have enough people paying taxes in today in order for those of us aging out to take out.

Speaker 3: 18:43

So you're saying[inaudible] uh, everybody benefits from a child, a child's education. Everybody benefits from that. And you think there's a chasm right now? I think so too, that there's a bunch of people who think at some point, I, it's not my problem anymore. And you're saying that it's essentially it's everybody's problem. And what I want to try to do is, is, is this

Richard Helppie: 19:05

appeal to the heart of people. The right thing to do is to take care of that young person who is growing up, regardless of the circumstances that they're in. They didn't cause the circumstances. They're kids. Let's get them educated because it's the right thing to do so that they have the best chance of a future. And, and also if you can't get there, if that's too bleeding, heart liberal for you, okay. Play to your own selfish interest. You still end up in the same place? You've got to educate. And

Speaker 3: 19:45

do you think the mindset's different now than it was, say in 1955, uh, 10 years after the war? It seemed like everybody seemed to be on the same page. I, we're building good schools. They're building, you know, teachers were valued heavily. Uh, remember, you know, parents dropping the kids off saying, look, deal with my kid, how you, will

Richard Helppie: 20:01

you, you know, you

Speaker 3: 20:02

go after him if he needs it. You know, I was sorry it brought that up because corporal punishment was when I was in junior high and it's both boards were hanging on the wall. Um, yet I am really glad that nobody's struck my child or my grandkids. Right. So, so there's that. Uh, but yes, I changed

Richard Helppie: 20:25

that adults, uh, during the time I was going to school. All right. Which was not in the fifties. I was not old enough to go at that point. Um, but, but yeah, there was a more of a community spirit. There was, there was, uh, and the schools weren't independent either. They were supported by community organizations. Uh, they were supported law enforcement, they were supported by a more robust church activity. Um, the juvenile justice system at that time also, um, was geared to getting the kid back on track and it was not the adversarial adult type of juvenile justice system that it's devolved into. And we also have burdened the public schools with a lot, a lot, a lot of social engineering. We, we burden them with, um, many requirements and nutritional as well. I mean, it, it's, it's now we feed them, teach them out that I don't have a problem with that, but we do a lot. W there is, there is a lot and that's all going through that uh, budget and there's some wonderful things. There's kids that get breakfast, lunch and dinner, right. And on the weekend they get a food pack and in the summer they can come in and get food pack. I have no problem with that. If their family could come in as long as it would get to the meat that the end that you're talking about and let, let's get a kid who's, who's ready to go out of the gate at 18. That's right. And there's a, and, and so when you think about things that we did, let's look at the technologies of the time, the telephone back then, that was the breakthrough technology. We had a universal access, um, uh, regulations in place so that everybody had some phone service. The internet today needs to be the same way. That's the gateway school, the school man this, and it's probably a lot less access. And I think it is, isn't it? I'm assuming that everybody has it, but I'm sitting here with it is, I don't have, I'm not asking for numbers, but is it a lot less total coverage for internet access then I'm thinking, I don't know, but I know that there's devices that I have and that I carry that not everybody could afford. I assume information immediately and maybe I shouldn't make that assumption for everybody or like we see in Wayne, I guess we see that straight away. We don't see kids that have that kind of access to information right away. And actually kind of as a sidebar on this, um, with education, you know, when I was in school, there was no such thing as, gosh, put your phone away, right? Didn't exist. Your phone was at home, right? Other do something hopeful that your mom or dad didn't get the call. You didn't want to hate it. But that's, that's a different sense. It did. I'm sure you had some of the, so, uh, so, um, the, and then it morphed to, Hey, when you come into class, turn your phone off. All right. And now what I'm understanding the teachers are doing, they're incorporating the device into the lesson. Go look this up. Go find, go find that, come back and make a PowerPoint presentation. And I think that's a really healthy thing. It's, it's riding the horse in the direction it's going and it is getting the education done. Um, and I know that I was privileged to speak at a high school graduation some years ago, and my message to the kids was real simple, work hard because I know anybody that accomplished anything without working hard. The second part was look it up yourself. And so be skeptical. Where did that information come from? Who shaped it? What did they leave out? Um, and, and really dig in,

Speaker 3: 24:25

ask the question, asking the question. Right. And so right now we're, we're looking at, you know, antitrust things around big tech and we have to find the right answer there and we'll find it managing it three hours with you on that. We're going to do that in another episode of this podcast. I would love to hear your take on that. We can't do it now, but yeah. And then the third thing,

Richard Helppie: 24:44

well, let's take care of people. Yeah. And, um, I think we're getting there. So, uh, but your, your original question was, uh, relative to where the public schools and education, and they're not, the public schools today are not the melting pot that they were in every community. Because today families have more choice, that there are charter. Uh, there are the faith based, there are other private schools, um, that are do a fine job of educating. Um, there are communities that have outstanding public schools. And it's interesting that there really aren't other alternative to is because there's no demand for them. People are satisfied with what they're getting from the public schools. So I think we need to make all the schools strong. I think they need to be grounded in real world things. I mean, kids still need to know how to write. They need to be able to have reading comprehension. They need to be able to do computation. Um, you know, and again, another thing that's fallen into the public schools, the basics of life. How do you open a checking account card? They probably won't write checks.

Speaker 3: 26:03

They, so your points taken, right? You know, how do you rent an apartment? How do you make a budget for a household? Um, you know, well, if your lights get turned off, how do you get them back on? Yeah, exactly. That's, that's a big one. Um, in some of these, uh, districts. Um, so I, I, I see where you're coming from on, on a lot of that, you know, your, your background is, um, um, in computers, uh, you're, uh, you're not proponents around word, but you're an appreciator of the binary world. You know, you, you appreciate things are either right or they're wrong, but I like your gray areas. So some of the things you that use, uh, speak about a great and that's, you know, from a lifetime in business as well. Well, that's the, Brian, that's one thing too that I really

Richard Helppie: 26:44

did want to talk about and that, um, I'm distressed by this notion of pick a side and I have witnessed so many people terminating relationships that could be very fruitful because they don't like a person's position on a particular issue or they don't like their party affiliation. Um,

Speaker 3: 27:16

it's unfortunate, isn't it? And you're right that that's become binary, right? You're there, enter your house. Right? And so the,

Richard Helppie: 27:25

I think that the case can be made

Speaker 4: 27:29

that

Richard Helppie: 27:30

party politics has failed.

Speaker 4: 27:34

That

Richard Helppie: 27:35

we are in an election cycle right now. And I'd like to ask people if, does it matter who the Democrat nominee is? And does it matter who wins in November, 2020. Now, rest assured you'll get very emotional, uh, answers to both those questions.

Speaker 4: 27:57

Okay.

Richard Helppie: 27:59

But I'd like to pose this question. How different are we today or how different would we be? Had the 2016 presidential election turned out the way everybody expected it to.

Speaker 3: 28:12

You think that the polarization would still be the same, the hatred on both sides of the year in year out? I'm against you. I'm for you would still be this.

Richard Helppie: 28:19

Think about how adept our politicians have become at partisanship. They're really, really good at it. And so the day that our current president was elected, the other party said, we are going to fight this. Resist this. There was no handshake across the aisle. There was no olive branch. There was no, let's put the election behind us. Let's work for the people. It was no, we are going to be very radical about opposition from day one.

Speaker 3: 28:54

Saw it on election day and an aggravation here. There are riots in the streets. And, uh, and in some cities, I'd never seen that before. That, that was troubling to me.

Richard Helppie: 29:00

Yeah. There were, there were riots during the, uh, during the election cycle and there were, um, you know, it's, it's despicable.

Speaker 3: 29:07

We didn't see that when, um, when Eisenhower was in the white house.

Richard Helppie: 29:11

Yeah. And don't remember Eisenhower in the white house, but that's a but, but no, there, there is a, um, there wasn't a sense that the stewardship of the country is being turned over and we're all going to work on things. And, and before somebody gets angry with it, had the election turned out the other way, there was going to be resistance as well. Um, probably not riding in the streets, but who knows? And right now this is why I, it really doesn't matter because when these parties are battling each other, who wins, who loses, who's left out and regrettably were left out. Yeah. And so what, what I think about on this podcast and what I think about what to do with the remaining time I have on earth, I like to think of the analogy of a bridge. So imagine a bridge spanning a chasm and you've got a support on let's say the right bank and it's a very strong support and it's people are working really hard to build that. And on the left bank, somebody is working really hard. Other people are too. They're going to try to build that left bank just as big and as strong as they can and now that span goes out across the chasm. They both collapse in the middle. Nobody gets across that chasm. There has to be reaching out from the right left from the left to the right with a big old support in the middle. And that's where it is. Is it your thought that there's a stream out there that's not, that doesn't have a voice right now. I'm hearing from you that it's there. There's, there's some people like you out there, but it's not on either extreme that you're hearing about that's getting that attention. First of all, I'd make terrible theater and it'd make terrible soundbites and it would make a terrible fodder for the national hysteria that the legacy media and the primary cable so-called news networks like to put on every night. So, so let me, let me kind of run through this then to the end. All right, I'm going to try to be a bro. I might get my brains beat out on this, but I'm going to try. We're going to try to be original. There's plenty of places for extremist to go. Okay. And if you've heard it on 10 other places, not going to hear it here because if you want to hear the far right, the far left, you all know where you can go everywhere. It's everywhere. You can go get that. We have solvable problems and so we're going to try to be solutions oriented. We're not going to give into dogma. We're not going to give into partisanship. I we'll call out stupidity no matter where it comes from. Um, that's an open market on certain places. And the preferred delivery method will be sarcasm, just because I'm very well practiced at that. Um, we will bring in interesting guests. Um, we will step off of hype and we will find out. We'll find out if there's more that unites us than divides us. Sounds like you're not looking for a winner or loser. You're looking to move forward. That's a great way to put it. And you know, if we can find a solution, a solution to immigration, there's a solution to guns there, solutions to healthcare. And you have to be able to sit down with people. And I, and sometimes when I talk about some of these solutions, people will look at me and they'll go, yeah, you know, that's a really good idea. And then, but, and then they'll start criticizing. If they're a Democrat, they'll start railing on the Republicans. If they're a Republican, they'll start railing on the Democrats. And can we just stop and say it's an idea and maybe tell the people that we elected who worked for us. We don't care about your party affiliation, we don't care if you have a D and R. And I a w, a P, whatever, next to your name, fix the problem. It's they're solvable problems. We can compromise. Not everybody's going to get their own way. But this notion that we're going to go from one extreme to the other and, and, and then, and then be surprised that we have this national anxiety in this face of this really robust economy. And if you looked at the, um, uh, statistics that came out this week about how the income household incomes are up and wages are up and it should be happy days are here again, but instead we have others statistics that show that we've got a lot of social ills and we need to calm down, back away from the partisan brinksmanship. And let's talk about what ails us and how to solve it. Folks, you've been listening to Richard helpee, businessman, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, and this is the first edition of the podcast. And we look forward to having a couple of more episodes down the road. Rich, thanks a lot for coming and I can't wait to hear your, uh, uh, your next episodes. This is going to be exciting

Speaker 1: 34:31

and I think you have a lot to talk about. Thank you very much. Thanks, Brian. You have been listening to Richard help is common bridge podcast recording and post-production provided by stunt three multimedia. All rights are reserved by Richard helpy. For more information, visit Richard[inaudible] dot com.