Posted on 10/17/2007 10:34:27 PM PDT by Lorianne
"The U.S. employer-based health-insurance system is failing," declares a new report by the Committee for Economic Development (CED). The CED is a Washington, D.C.-based policy think tank comprised of business and education leaders. And it is right: Employer-based health-insurance is indeed failing.
Between 2000 and 2007, the percentage of firms offering health insurance benefits fell from 69 percent to 60 percent. The percentage of people under age 65 with employer provided insurance dropped by 68 to 63 percent. In absolute numbers, those covered by job-based insurance fell from 179.4 million to 177.2 million.
Employers are jettisoning health insurance because costs are out of control. Since 2001, premiums for family coverage have increased 78 percent, while wages have gone up 19 percent and inflation is up 17 percent. The consequence is that health insurance is the number one domestic policy issue in the 2008 presidential race.
So what is the CED's prescription for our ailing health insurance system? The report promisingly begins by recommending the creation of "a system of market-based universal health insurance." In order to achieve this, the CED would make health insurance mandatory for every American.
The CED proposal envisions the creation of independent regional exchanges that would act as a single point of entry for each individual to choose among competing private health plans. The exchanges would set minimum benefit plans. The exchanges would also cut through the thickets of state health insurance regulations that add substantially to the costs of insurance. Individuals could purchase insurance above and beyond the minimum benefit plans with after tax dollars.
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
I had a friend who had all four of their kids at home, he said it cost them about six hundred bucks a kid for maternity checkups and the birth-nurse.
On the other hand, both our kids were c-sections at a hospital, which I figured cost more than the total amount I had paid for health insurance by that point.
Nothing though compared to my son’s 10 days in neonatal icu. That was more expensive than my car.
On the other hand, I didn’t have insurance to buy my car, I just saved up the $25,000 and bought a car. So I guess that if I didn’t have insurance, I would have found a way to save up the $25,000 to pay for my son’s medical treatments.
Difference being that everybody buys a car, not everybody has to have expensive medical treatment. So if I got together with some friends, we could all agree that if any of us needs medical care, we will all pay equally for it.
Hey, that’s insurance.
That’s a sad story, but not germaine so far as I can tell. The problem there wasn’t a cold-hearted populace who would let people die, it was a scarcity of a resouce (hearts).
It’s that scarcity that supports the more “capitalist” approach of requiring money to get on the list (my health insurance would pay for that transplant).
If there were enough hearts for everybody who needed one, there’s no way they’d let the kid die and a heart go to wast just because the father didn’t have $100,000 to put up.
I understand about the humor amputation. I was going to post similarly, as my own sense of humor in this area was also amputated.
When he was checked into the pediatric emergency room, my son neither was bleeding, nor was anything broken, nor was anything that should have been on the inside on the outside.
However, the brain tumor WAS the size of a golf ball, and the neurologist thought that was a good reason to admit through the emergency department. But heck, he’s a mere doctor with over 30 years experience, a tenured professor at the best hospital in the United States. What does he know?
By the way, the tumor was removed five days later and the prognosis is very good.
sitetest
OK, great response. Some of that I anticipated.
You are absolutely correct, most of our “health insurance” isn’t insurance at all, but simply prepaid purchases. I buy dental insurance and go to the dentist twice a year, obviously part of my insurance premium is just pre-paying those visits. For more money I get coverage for orthodontics, so I grab the higher coverage when my kids get to that age and I prepay the orthodontics.
BTW, I do that because the insurance company has bargained down costs below what I can easily get, or else I’d just pay the bills directly.
But part of health insurance is catastrophic care, care that if not performed would lead to death. Nobody would be that upset if uninsured people had to suffer more from colds and flu, or went a few days with an ear infection because they couldn’t get treatment.
It’s the permanent disability and death that we are fighting about.
Your comment about Mt McKinley is also a great one. If you don’t buy the insurance, you can’t climb. That’s MANDATORY INSURANCE. IT’s what someone noted a while ago though, climbing a mountain is a choice, as is driving. If you don’t by health insurance, do they simply not let you live?
What if they had insurance for climbing, but you could waive it. Then if you got lost, you are on your own, too bad.
After a few years, a group of boy scouts gets lost. Turns out they were from the inner-city, and their families were poor, and couldn’t afford the insurance, so they waived it.
Too bad, they all die? No way. We send the rescuers out. We aren’t going to win that one. And since we DO rescue them, the 10 inner-city groups that slaved to RAISE the money last year won’t make THAT mistake again.
If we could have a plan where you could waive health insurance in exchange for NEVER getting any government health care if you get sick, that would work, but it wouldn’t “stick”. In the end we’d pay for them anyway.
And while I mentioned volunteers, it’s also paid forces. We have a mix of paid and volunteer fire personnel. And fires are rare, but so is cancer, and heart attacks, and a lot of the more expensive medical care.
Medical care is a very complex problem. I don’t think we do it justice to simply attack someone like Romney for his approach, because the sound bites trivialize the problem and are unimplementable.
As to your comment about keeping “everybody else’s house from burning down”, even if true (not so much I think today) it’s still the same thing, we don’t make each OTHER homeowner hire a private company to protect them from the house fire spreading, we have the government do that.
It’s not like we think the original house fire is obviously the homeowner’s fault and therefore they deserve to have their house burn down, but the next door neighbor “did nothing wrong” and therefore we should spend tax dollars to save him.
It’s that we decided as a society that society is better off if we don’t let things burn down, and we decided to spend tax dollars to protect from that, even for a single house.
Maybe it’s NOT germaine, let’s look some more. My brother broke his back, and after leaving the job with that insurance, because he couldn’t do the work anymore, he could not get insurance anywhere, again, for him or his family. Fortunately, he had enough money to escrow the 100K. If he hadn’t, are you telling me medicaid would have picked it up, and paid for the transplant? Because I don’t see medicaid paying for heart transplants.
Or if my brother had had to sell everything he owned to afford the transplant, would medicaid have helped him, when it was all gone?
Actually, as you say the point is moot as there were no hearts.
Medicaid pays when you have nothing. You have to do a “spend down” which means what it sounds like, before you are eligible for medicaid. If you CAN’T get insurance, what then? And in Missouri, even though they cannot take your house when you are living, and qualify for medicaid, after you die, they can sue the estate for everything they paid out.
The problem comes for those who are just a “little” wealthy and can’t afford insurance. Mine costs 2400/year, I’m 60 years old, I get half paid through work. Thank God I own my house and car. If my rheumatoid arthritis gets much worse, I won’t be able to work any more. Where do I get insurance then, till I’m 62 and eligible for medicaid? What if I get cancer? Or flu that destroys my heart muscle?
You really do not know how the middle class medical payment works, when the shtf.
So if I got together with some friends, we could all agree that if any of us needs medical care, we will all pay equally for it.
Just curious, would you include any underwriting criteria, or would you offer the same deal to all your friends regardless of their health, habits, etc?
You could still have ‘collective purchasing’ through trade organizations, unions, churches, AARP .... etc.
And you’d have the biggest collective purchasing there is ... the free market. We don’t have employers to negotiate prices for our purchases at the supermarket or Wal-Mart.
Prices stay low through competition.
My healthcare costs me 145.00 per month for my entire family. That includes dental and vision. I have a 1,200 deduct . We do have to use healthcare providers associated with the hospital. You can opt out and use an outside source but you will pay extra. I don’t use the ER thats a 100 co-pay.
You tell me how the governments going to give me a better deal and I’ll listen,but I bet they can’t.
How will shifting health care costs from employer to taxpayer help at all with out of control costs? Making health care free for retired and poor people will induce more usage increasing costs. People without jobs have a lot of time on their hands to spend in soviet style rationing lines.
Employers insurance premiums are before-tax. This calls for individuals to pay income tax before buying reasonable waiting room time level service, a tax increase. How will increasing taxes and demand do a thing for rising costs? Are people willing to give up their lotto lawsuits and resulting defensive over-care to slow runaway costs? If so we don't need Hillarycare to accomplish that.
Our rural fire department is membership based. We pay a yearly membership fee. They will not fight a fire at your house if you aren’t a member, but they will show up with the water trucks to protect your neighbor who is a member.
I think you misunderstand the writer’s proposal. He’s not advocating for government insurance.
We pay a 7 cent property tax rate rider for fire and rescue services, and they will put out any fire. We have a mix of paid firefighters and volunteers.
It would be nice if we could experiment with medical care that way, on a locality-by-locality basis, first to see waht works, and later to allow different solutions with the people deciding what solution they want.
I imagine it would take lawyers to pull that off. If it was a commune we’d probably all just trust each other until someone tried to rip us off, then we’d kick them out. :-)
I’m very much in favor of the individual/family seeking insurance independent of their employer. I also agree with your points regarding the competitive advantage to the consumer when the products are in effect decentralized.
Listen for the big corps that are expressing interest in the proposed socialized health care and the perceived benefit of offloading the cost to the gov’t (which would be you, me, and the other guy/gal). In this case, the tax payer ends up subsidizing Big-Health-Care-Cost-Evader and the investors, domestic and foreign, reap the windfall at our expense. If corps don’t want to offer health care, that’s ok. But, there will inevitably be a higher salary expense on the balance sheet since the cost of health care will still need to be covered.
Treat them, bill them, and let them sort it all out. If they can’t pay, then they’ll be on the hook for the rest of their lives or until they can raise enough money through private sources.
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you are assuming that they’d get the proper care even if they don’t have the money *now*
On that one point you would rest your case? LOL
Are you saying manufacturers shouldn’t be free to develop the price structures as they see fit from nation to nation? Anotherwords you want Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed to set the prcing, correct?
You touch on the societal factors involved in pricing from one nation to the next, acknowledge why, then seemingly dismiss it out of hand. Do you think Mexico and Costa Rica should pay the same price we do? I doubt you do. So what you come up with is an arguement that if they are going to be charged a lower rate based on their economic standing, we should get the same price break.
On what grounds to you support that, jealousy?
It’s accurate
see the following
http://www.nahu.org/consumer/GroupInsurance.cfm
Those functions were not meant to be implied to be the hospital’s perview. They were used to accentuate the point that insurance companies shiphen off valuable healthcare funds for nothing more than unnecessary administrative functions. Do we really need gatekeepers, or do we really need healthcare services?
Your comments don’t describe the physicians I know. They show up to make their rounds from 6:30am to 11:30pm. Their offices make appointments in advance. They also squeeze in others who have emergencies pop up. Many of them spend quite a bit of time on call. During that time they leave their homes to provide service at all hours. They have spent more than a decade to persue and education and be trained in their specialties, at which time the begin to pay off their massive debt.
Bankers hours? LOL
Look, indigents and illegal aliens have flooded the E.R.s in the last decade or so. In general most people still visit their physician’s office for care.
As for nurses taking on more responsibility, there have been moves to utilize nurse practitioners who can make assessments, provide moderate healthcare services and even prescribe.
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