Monday, September 6, 2010

No Surprises

In the most unsurprising development of health care reform----the Obama iteration that awkwardly tries to fuse private and public coverage plans, thereby preserving the billion dollar health care "insurance" industry---- it has become apparent that the increased costs employers expect to pay for health care have simply been passed on to its employees.
Since 2005, while wages have increased just 18 percent, workers’ contributions to premiums have jumped 47 percent, almost twice as fast as the rise in the policy’s overall cost.

Workers also increasingly face higher deductibles, forcing them to pay a larger share of their overall medical bills. “The long-term trend is pretty clear,” said Drew E. Altman, the chief executive of the Kaiser foundation, which conducted the survey this year with the Health Research and Educational Trust, a research organization affiliated with the American Hospital Association. “Insurance is getting stingier and less comprehensive.”......companies expect that their costs will only go up more under the new health care law because it requires them to provide more benefits, like coverage for preventive care.


Unbelievable isn't it? Who would have thought that for profit entities would do everything in their power to stay in the black. Given the choice to pay the higher health care costs out of a healthy profit margin versus freezing employee wages and earnings, it's hardly surprising that the private sector opts for the latter.

Simply mandating that companies pay for health care without articulating a method of subsidizing it or controlling the escalating cost of health care provision (beyond vague, unspecific programs like the Independent Payment Advisory Board) is not a viable long term solution to the crisis. That is the failure of Obamacare.

2 comments:

Andrew_M_Garland said...

It is misleading to talk about "what the employer pays" toward healthcare or anything else. Employers organize work and production, they don't pay anything themselves (other than personal taxes). Their customers and employees pay.

ObamaCare increases health insurance premiums and requires the employer to pay that increase. But, the employer pays this cost of employment out of the production of the employee. So, the employer must offer a lower wage or fire the employee. The employee will likely blame the employer, not ObamaCare.

ObamaCare will raise health insurance premiums more than they would have risen. If employers try to reduce their coverage and costs, they will lose their “grandfather” protections, and be forced to purchase even more coverage under ObamaCare mandates.

Employers are required to sustain "their" contribution to the cost of health benefits. This hides ObamaCare’s effect on health insurance premiums.

Health economists almost all agree that the “employer contribution” is a fiction. Employers merely deduct what they pay for health benefits from the overall compensation offered to employees. In other words, the employee pays for his own health benefits. The employer only writes the check for him.

--> The Employee Pays Higher ObamaCare Costs

Anonymous said...

Guess I'm lucky my employer covered the cost of my Rotator Cuff Repair last month..
Oh yeah, I'm Self Employed.

Frank