Similar stories:
•
Make your health benefits a priority
It's that time of year -- open enrollment for your employment benefits package.
It's time to determine if you want to stick with your current health insurance plan or switch. You may have to decide about your employer-provided life insurance or disability insurance or whether to sign up for legal or financial planning services.
One thing you need to do for sure -- open the documents when they arrive in the mail or read the information online. It's a pain, I know, but too many employees do nothing at all, allowing their employers to choose for them, typically signing them up for what they had the previous year.
•
Businesses: Health care costs stymie expansion
What's the biggest hurdle to growth for businesses today?
Clue: It's not the economy.
For about 180 employers polled in a survey commissioned by HealthPartners, health care costs for employees emerged as the most-common obstacle to business expansion, more so than the economy itself, access to funding or flaccid consumer demand.
•
Health costs to rise in 2010
Fifty-four percent of U.S. adults think health-care reform won't pass this year, according to a new survey by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions.
Most of us will get the same-old, same-old -- another open enrollment period for our employment-based health-insurance plans. And that same-old, same-old means another round of cost increases.
National surveys and checks with local brokers indicate 2010 plan costs will jump 10% to 12% on average, with employees footing more of the bill.
•
Congress should act to maintain COBRA health insurance subsidies
Unless Congress and the president act soon, many unemployed workers and their dependents may lose their health insurance if a federal subsidy to help them pay for the coverage isn't extended.
The economic stimulus package passed in February established an employer-provided subsidy for unemployed workers under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, commonly referred to as COBRA.
COBRA gives former employees the opportunity to temporarily continue their health coverage at their employer group rates. The problem is that many families can't afford the premium, which can be more than $1,000 a month. But under the stimulus plan, workers involuntarily terminated between Sept. 1, 2008, and Dec. 31 of this year were granted the subsidy, through their former employers, to help cover their COBRA premiums for nine months.
•
EDITORIAL: Governor needs to quit role as whiner-in-chief
Gov. Schwarzenegger doesn't like Nebraska's special deal in the Senate health bill. We agree and believe lawmakers should remove the Nebraska exception as they negotiate a final bill.
But we have concerns about Schwarzenegger's other health care complaints. He's been misrepresenting what the other 49 states would get out of making health insurance more affordable to uninsured adults.
The states would have no new costs for expanding Medicaid for lower-income adults until 2018. Serving as whiner-in-chief of the richest state in the union doesn't suit the governor well.
It's past time to separate health insurance from employment. Forays into "consumer directed" plans and "employee wellness" programs -- such as HMOs and PPOs before them -- have done squat to fix the expensive and arbitrary employment-based insurance system that covers about six in 10 Americans.
In the 1940s, when war-related wage controls put a lid on pay raises, employer-based health insurance was born. As an alternate form of compensation, health benefits were a means to attract and keep good workers.
Did anyone foresee the benefits becoming the albatross that drags down the global competitiveness of U.S. companies?
Still, the costs of COBRA coverage, inability to get individual coverage with a pre-existing condition and high costs of open-market policies all make employer-subsidized plans the holy grail of health care.
It's time to acknowledge that the adoration is misplaced.
Employment at a sponsoring firm shouldn't be the measure by which one has access to affordable health care.
What about the workers who toil for employers who can't or won't subsidize policies? Fewer than half of small businesses provide employee health insurance.
Attempts to mandate employer-subsidized coverage are going nowhere -- and they shouldn't. They're not fair, either, given arbitrary cutoffs for which establishments would fall under the mandate.
Fifteen employees? You're covered. Fourteen employees? You're not. You call that fair?
Meanwhile, about 2% of employers annually are opting out of providing employee health insurance plans.
And at workplaces that still sponsor health insurance plans, the rumbles of discontent mount with each passing open enrollment week.
It's not just that costs continue spiraling for both employers and employees. It's that workers are wiser to the fact that there's just one pot of money for pay and benefits.
Every dollar that goes to an employee benefit is a dollar that comes out of base pay.
But here's the crucial question with a still-unknown answer: Without a semi-paternalistic, employment-based system, will people be responsible health-care consumers?
E-Mail
Print
@Nyx.CommentBody@