Posted on 09/28/2012 8:24:43 AM PDT by Lorianne
Two big employers are planning a radical change in the way they provide health benefits to their workers, giving employees a fixed sum of money and allowing them to choose their medical coverage and insurer from an online marketplace.
Sears Holdings Corp. and Darden Restaurants Inc. say the change isn't designed to make workers pay a higher share of health-coverage costs. Instead they say it is supposed to put more control over health benefits in the hands of employees.
The approach will be closely watched by firms around the U.S. If it eventually takes hold widely, it might parallel the transition from company-provided pensions to 401(k) retirement-savings plans controlled by workers and funded partly by employer contributions. For employees, the concern will be that they could end up more directly exposed to the upward march of health costs.
"It's a fundamental change…the employer is saying, 'Here's a pot of money, go shop,' " said Paul Fronstin, director of health research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonprofit. The worry for employees is that "the money may not be sufficient and it may not keep up with premium inflation."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Nothing has changed.
An employee earns the employer a multiple of their salary + benefits or they are gone ... or the business goes bankrupt and all the employees are gone.
Always been that way.
Actually, McCain proposed this as a reform and it was going to be a tax credit for the employee.
Good! A reason for American employees to start caring about healthcare inflation. Something similar would happen if the guv just gave some lump sum toward Jr’s higher education, rather than play the game of loans for it.
Exactly.
AND everyone should pay their own damn taxes instead of the employer taking it out of their paycheck for them. If they had to write the IRS a check every month or quarter they would really feel it.
true, that.
No, this is a way for companies to prepare to dump peoples' health insurance coverage starting in 2014.
The trouble is, as long as people are more concerned with premiums and the size of co-payments rather than the actual costs to deliver the healthcare, the problem will always exist. When providers have to concern themselves with meeting the paperwork requirements of bureaucrats to get paid their pittance (be they insurance bureaucrats or government bureaucrats), rather than figuring out more efficient ways of meeting demand, there will not be innovation to make healthcare more affordable. Rather, there will be ways to figure out how to game the system more effectively...on both ends.
The only way out of this is:
Otherwise, you're just dealing with fascism vs socialism...the same bird, just from different angles.
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