This post is about an article i was reading, Job-Based Health Insurance: Sick and Getting Sicker, from Dollars & Sense. The article discusses the recent trends of job-based health insurance and the horrible effects.
In the past having a stable job meant that medical bills was something you never had to think about. Most companies took a small percentage of their employee’s paycheck to cover the small premium. Nowadays large portions of your paycheck will never be seen as it is shuffled away to cover huge premium cost.
A report from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that employee contributions for health premiums increased a remarkable 50% between 2000 to 2003
And that is only if you are lucky. Increasingly employees do not even have job-based health insurance. This is because of a change in the labor market.
Workers today are less likely to be in a union and more likely to work part time. In addition, more people work in the service sector, where employers often provide less generous health benefits than in manufacturing.
These workers are then force to seek out health insurance as an individual, a very expense task. And the price is rising. Health care cost have been inflating because of the new cost that come along with technological innovations. These rising cost have also caused more companies to pull their job-based insurance programs entirely. They, like many of the individuals seeking insurance, simply cannot afford it.
80% of the nation’s 44 million uninsured are in working families.
The figure is a little suprising, but with the increasing drop of employee programs with the increasing premiums and medical cost it unfortunately makes sense. Less than half of all employed workers now get job-based insurance.
And you thought it was only Wal-Mart, who creating shifts that just barely miss the full-time requirements, that cut corners to avoid having to provide insurance. Other companies are just as bad, but they use a different, more secretive approach.
Along with raising premiums, co-pays have also gotten more expensive. The companies raise the co-pay because that means that it is more expensive to go to the doctor, which will lead to less people going, translating into less services for the company to pay.
The higher the front-end costs to workers, the fewer total services used, and the lower the amount companies pay out for insurance. In effect, employers are using point-of-service fees to control overall costs.
It is sick to think that a company would knowingly make their employee, someone who you might have thought they would want to be healthy so that they could perform better, choose between a doctor visit and paying the rent.
This is hinting to a larger problem within the American health care system. Although it may seem like we are lucky to live in a country where the government does not ration our access to medical care like in other countries with government-provided care. We in fact are having are care rationed, but not on the basis of fairness, but rather
Americans’ access to medical care is rationed by their ability to pay.
This in a sense crystallizes the problems with financializing everything. Things that should not necessarily be profit driven, like basic health coverage, become that way. The scariest aspect of a profit driven medical care is what medical care is destant to become.
Most people in the United States don’t think of medical care as a consumer good, but as a necessity to which everybody should have equal access. As prices rise and coverage shrinks, it might become something else altogether—a luxury item.
