Area residents can learn more about the debate over health care and insurance reform in two public meetings — a town hall meeting tonight with Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville, and an independent forum at North Central Texas College on Wednesday evening.

The town hall meeting, organized in response to residents’ requests, will be conducted from 7 to 8 p.m. at Trietsch Memorial United Methodist Church in Flower Mound.

The independent forum will be conducted from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in Room 314 at NCTC’s Corinth campus.

In addition, Burgess has organized two health care insurance forums for the business community. Residents can watch them via webcast Wednesday morning and afternoon.

Local restaurant owner Ken Willis will participate in the morning forum, doing his best to represent both small-business owners and restaurant owners, he said.

“I’ve definitely got concerns from the scuttlebutt I’ve been hearing,” Willis said. “I’ve also got some more reading to do before then.”

Willis owns Ruby’s Diner on the Square and Beth Marie’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream & Soda Fountain. He said he was concerned about a proposal to have employers paying into health insurance, whether they offer a policy directly to their employees or not. 

Willis said his profit margins, and his workload, don’t leave enough room to support another expense or more paperwork.

“When my dad owned his small business — a restaurant — he took 40 percent of his earnings to the bottom line,” Willis said. “These days, when a restaurant takes 2 percent to the bottom line, that’s considered excellent. It’s all I can do to pay the bills.”

He has offered health insurance to his employees, he said, but they turn it down in favor of more pay.

University of North Texas Health Science Center professor Dr. Kristine Lykens, an expert in health care policy and management, said small-business owners often don’t get good rates from health insurance companies.

“There are some legitimate concerns on that,” Lykens said.

In addition, some workers are inclined to see the short term and not think about the impact the cost of health care has on their long-term well-being. Younger workers, in particular, don’t think they need health insurance — until the bill comes for a sports injury or a pregnancy.

Lykens will be one of five local experts on a nonpartisan panel discussing health insurance issues Wednesday at NCTC.

History professor Lisa Morales, who organized the forum, sought a variety of perspectives and types of expertise for the discussion.

“So many forums have focused on the individual consumer’s concerns about the health care system,” Morales said. “I’m not sure people with medical expertise are driving the current policy discussions.”

She asked panel members to focus on four ideas, including discussing what does and doesn’t work in the current health care system, whether the latest proposals from President Obama and Congress will address the problems, and, if not, what could solve those problems.

The panel of experts also includes Dr. Stephen Inrig, a medical historian and health policy analyst from UT Southwestern Medical Center, who can address past policy successes and failures, Morales said.

Stan Morton, chief executive officer of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Denton, and Dr. Forney Fleming, a surgeon and instructor at the University of Texas at Dallas, will offer multiple perspectives from the provider’s view, Morales said.

Another UNT professor, Jeffrey Rous, an economist who specializes in health care research, also will join the panel.

While it takes nearly 10 weeks for students in his “Economics of Health Care” class to learn factors that affect health care costs, Rous said people can understand the debate better if they know two key parts of the problem.

First, people need to understand that health insurance is not like car insurance, where the cost of an individual’s risk is weighed against his or her driving history, he said.

Instead, “health insurance is social insurance,” Rous said, adding that when the risk is shared companywide, “the premium for a healthy 25-year-old is the same for a 62-year-old with diabetes.”

Insuring large groups of people lowers the risk for an insurer and reduces administrative costs, too.

Economic research on saving other administrative costs, such as malpractice insurance reform and electronic record-keeping, shows they are so small that they have little impact, Rous said.

Second, people don’t like the idea of health care rationing, he said.

However, it’s been going on for some time. In the 1970s, health care was less expensive because doctors and hospitals didn’t have as much to offer as they do today, he said.

Technological advances, moreover, tend to focus on quality of life and not so much on cost-savings measures, Rous said. Those advances will continue to push the envelope of what is a reasonable cost for everyone to share.

Organ transplants, for example, are limited by what living tissue can be donated. When technology advances enough that new organs can be grown from stem cells, the ethical dilemma of the cost will increase.

“Then we’re faced with 100,000 liver transplants at $1 million each, and we have to ask, who is going to pay for that?” Rous said.

Americans may decide some things are worth paying for, he said.

“Either way, we don’t want to create a system that’s more costly and still doesn’t address the problem,” Rous said.

PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE can be reached at 940-566-6881. Her e-mail address is pheinkel-wolfe@dentonrc.com.