Every once in a while I end up eating lunch down at the coffeeshop a table away from my favorite banker. He's from around here and I'm not, but we're both problem solvers and sports fans, and my sense is that his the dynamics of his job are such that he's obliged to eat alone. (Or maybe he likes his privacy, and I'm intruding.)
So it goes. (He seems good natured about the intrusions, and so they continue.)
In any event, we were talking about the economic prospects of our corner of Appalachia, and the region's need to attract new business, new industry, high paying jobs.
The usual stuff.
Quite unexpectedly I had an idea. It is well beyond my competence to know whether it's a good idea, or even remotely viable. And so I thought I'd toss it into this cauldron and see if it boiled down to anything.
Very simply...every state and local political entity struggles to create incentives to attract new businesses and new jobs. It is often the case, one reads, that these tax incentives bring businesses to this new place only so long as the incentives last, and then the businesses migrate elsewhere, taking their money and their jobs with them. No, not their money. The taxpayers' money.
Nevertheless, we persist in giving away land and tax credits and anything else we can think of in the hopes that a few more jobs will be added to the region, a few more paychecks to the tax rolls.
At the same time, we struggle -- as a family, as a region, as a nation -- with the patchwork quilt of health care and health insurance. Our local hospital does $1-million a month in unreimbursed health care, for example. And as my favorite (Republican) doctor is prone to note, much of that expense could better be spent building (and subsidizing) family medical practices which were able to prevent emergency care.
All of which ties up here: What if our county (and, obviously, not just this county) were to establish some kind of useful health care coverage for its residents? To extend the coverage given to city and county employees to everyone who lived here? Yes, it would cost a bundle, and Appalachia hasn't that kind of money. But what if it were treated and marketed as an economic incentive to attract new business? How many employers would find it to their advantage to move to a place which guaranteed health coverage and took that burden from their compensation packages?
Now...I'm not a health care professional. I know nothing about health care, and rarely seek the advice of doctors. Nor do I know anything at all about insurance, nor about the dynamics behind business relocation.
But I figure there's enough of an idea here -- if I've expressed it clearly -- to be worth tossing out for discussion.