As post-State of the Union Washington gears up for an all-consuming ideological smackdown on Social Security, those concerned about bigger national problems – such as spiraling health care costs and the 45 million uninsured – will need to look elsewhere for progress. One bright spot in this dispiriting landscape came the other day when a coalition of 60 big companies (including IBM, GE and Sears) announced an innovative new plan that may reach as many as 3 million of the uninsured.

Their new program is called “National Health Access,” and as its designers explained to me, it’s meant to offer workers and their dependents who don’t have access to employer-subsidized group health insurance today a way to buy better coverage than they could get in the individual market.

The plan will create a new insurance pool comprised mostly of part-time workers who are generally not eligible for benefits at these companies, contractors who do business with these firms and the firms’ pre-Medicare retirees (as well as the families of all these folks). The existence of a decent-sized pool allows an insurer – in this case UnitedHealth Group, which has developed the insurance products for the coalition – to offer more comprehensive plans at a lower cost than these people would otherwise be able to get on their own.

As someone who has personally experienced what it is like to discover your family is uninsurable in the individual market, the most attractive feature of the new plan is that there will be no “medical underwriting” – the fancy name for the process by which insurers shun individuals who seem to pose undue medical risks (or charge these individuals sky-high premiums that they often can’t afford).

Eligible workers will be able to choose from among six tiers of coverage with different prices and levels of benefits. Andy Slavitt, the UnitedHealth executive in charge of the new plans, told me these tiers were developed after extensive market research as to what uninsured people (especially with lower incomes) actually valued and could afford.

This isn’t a charitable endeavor, to be sure. Slavitt says UnitedHealth is hoping that the pool being created will let UnitedHealth realize normal group-coverage profit margins despite the risk (from the insurer’s standpoint) of guaranteeing coverage to all comers.

If they can pull it off, this ambition is significant. Ordinarily the individual market is the most profitable for insurers – precisely because insurers tend to reject (or charge huge premiums to) less healthy folks who actually need insurance. If the economics of this new pooling model can work for both insurer and insurees, it might lead more companies to join this coalition, which in turn would stabilize the costs and risks for insurers even more.

The result could be a virtuous cycle that broadens the ranks of uninsured Americans who would not be subject to the individual market’s awful bias against less healthy people – while also stretching their health care dollars as they piggyback on the group’s purchasing power.

To be sure, it’s still a sophisticated patch on a broken system. A cynic might say that under the guise of a beneficent step, these employers hope to preemptively shift full responsibility for the costs of coverage to these part-time workers and others. Maybe they reckon the halo of such “good innovations” will fend off government attempts to force employers to bear more of the costs of covering such folks themselves.

Still, in an imperfect world, many people will find this patch to be a lifeline. It’s also a genuine effort to design socially beneficial new insurance products for the uninsured, as opposed to the kind of “cherry-picking” through which some insurers tailor new insurance products to, say, healthy twentysomething men – creating big profit centers while essentially telling the country that the broader insurance system’s pooling challenges are somebody else’s problem.

Moreover, as Dr. Bob Galvin, director of Corporate Health Care and Medical Programs at GE told me, National Health Access will require UnitedHealth as insurer to develop and publish new quality and cost metrics that should help us better understand what value we actually get for our health care dollar. This remains American medicine’s ultimate mystery.

So three cheers for private-sector innovation. With Washington determined to ignore health care in the near term, the companies behind National Health Access deserve praise for an effort that’s not only good for their PR and for the people in their extended corporate families, but may offer insights and options for the rest of the country as well.

Matt Miller is a syndicated columnist and author. Reach him on the Web at: www.mattmilleronline.com.

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