Posted on 11/07/2019 4:40:53 AM PST by The Houston Courant
Yep. “More choice” means a return to junk plans that are affordable but don’t cover anything.
Just as we’re seeing with the short-term plans now being offered.
Only for myself. Why would I do that for my employees? The whole purpose of my business model is to stay the hell out of the health care business for my employees.
Does anyone in this world who is NOT an employer even understand how much money it costs an employer to provide medical coverage for their employees even beyond the cost of the insurance premiums themselves? I left my old employer and started my own company because the overhead cost of an HR staff that contributed absolutely nothing to the company's revenues made it so difficult to be competitive in my industry.
Solidarity Health Shares. Better than insurance. Check it out. Full disclosure: I do not have any interest in this health sharing scheme. I am a member. I was paying COBRA to ex’s employer at $750/month just to cover myself. Found out $125 a month was a fee the employer added on just because. Anyway, health sharing is definitely the way to go. Paying $199/month now.
Exactly. Why would other corporations fund them either?
During the financial crisis I thought I better look into health insurance in case I got terminated. My options at the time were to buy COBRA coverage which was close to $800 a month. I was a healthy 50 year old and didn't need the Cadillac coverage. If I would have been let go, I would have purchased one of those junk plans for around $200 a month until I found a job..
True, but keep in mind that other employers are subject to ObamaCare provisions that REQUIRE them to provide medical coverage for their employees (side note: I consider this an even bigger abomination than the individual mandate under ObamaCare). The HRA is an attempt to secure less expensive options than traditional insurance coverage, as I understand it.
But I can see the argument, isn’t having fewer employees and resources devoted to things that aren’t related to the core of a company’s business a good thing?
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All this HRA approach does is shift the risk from the employer to the employee.
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You make that sound like it’s a BAD thing.
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Employees, on the other hand, are now on their own in the individual market which in many states offers very limited options.
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Sounds like the People should demand govt get the F* outta the way & let the Free Market go ITS job.
This is a little off the topic of this article, but there was mention made of price & wage controls. I was a little young to remember FDR’s version of that, but as I recall,Jimmy Carter as president had set price & wage controls at one time. The way that worked was that employers(some at least)were all too happy with the wage control part of it. The price control part was worked a little different in some cases. I remember that new cars(as an example) were price controlled, however the manufacturer could come out with a new version of the previous year’s product as a new-model-in-name-only & get around the price obstacle. Suddenly, Henry Ford’s idea of an affordable new car for the average worker sorta went by the wayside. Neat trick,huh? Glad to see the controls done away with.
We crawl down each other’s throats arguing over whether an employer or the government should be paying for health care instead of asking the only pertinent question. Why is health care so expensive in the U.S. that no one other than an employer or the government can afford to pay for it?
If a manufacturer makes a car that people can’t afford to buy he either figures out how to make it cheaper, takes less profit on it, or goes out of business. If health care can’t be afforded by the average person we don’t shop for cheaper health care or demand that the provider take less profit, we argue about how to shift the costs around until someone else is paying for it.
We’re addressing it the wrong way. Instead of arguing over who pays for health care we should be asking who is getting rich off of the exhorbitant cost of U.S. health care and why. We’re getting milked in the U.S., telling me it costs $10,000 a night for a hospital room or $25 for an aspirin I can buy for a penny at wal-mart isn’t believeable. We need to get to the root of the organized crime that’s ripping us off, follow the money and go after the crooks behind the curtain. Shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic isn’t cutting it.
Sure, and if something bad happened to you you would have been on the hook.
I'm not saying these plans don't have a place but no one should kid themselves. The way they're lowering cost is by delivering less value.
It's great for the business.
As I said, it shifts all the risk to the employee.
I see comments, don’t know what you’re looking at, or what you are implying.
You see threads posted, not comments.
I love the sentiment but it's just a fact that the healthcare market is different and free market principles don't apply in traditional ways.
One basic issue is that markets have winners and loser but as a society we've decided we don't want losers if it means they can't get healthcare.
We have laws that say they can't be refused emergency care and as a practical matter they're rarely refused care for not being able to pay. Unlike other markets instead of the loser taking his losses we've socialized the costs and the rest of society picks them up.
The whole third-party payer thing also distorts the market in crazy ways plus the fact that the purchase of healthcare is often not discretionary.
It's evolved into a very different animal in this country and our approach has to deal with that reality.
It is all about how much risk does one want to take. It is nice to have great health insurance, but if you don't have a pot to piss in when you retire, what good is it?
I don’t see why healthcare is all an employer’s responsibility.
flr
3rd party paying, and government attempts to promote, micro-manage and gerrymander it over many decades, are forcing up costs, and creating a lot of corruption, which will ultimately destroy American healthcare.
We have created a society that expects someone else to pay for their healthcare, and huge bureaucracies and special interests have sprung up around this. Change will therefore be nearly impossible.
My idea is to create “free trade zones” for healthcare as an alternative.
And if Obamacare gets struck down, which may happen next June, what incentive is there for corporations to fund HRAs for their employees? It's just another expense.
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