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10.26.2003
The Health Insurance Question? Something that has bothered me for a while. And I don't claim to have all the answers here. I have alot of questions though and I would appreciate feedback on this one. The topic: Benefits. Right now, as the system stands, you quit your job and you lose your benefits. This means that you go through a period of time where you have no access to health insurance unless you pay for COBRA, which is extremely expensive. Why is that in this day and age, your access to a doctor is determined by your employment status? It seems like an anamoly in the market system. You don't lose your car insurance when you lose your job. What rubs me the wrong way is that access to health insurance has become vital as the cost of health care has risen. But your access to this vital resource is in the hands of your employer. At the moment they decide to fire you or lay you off you lose that insurance. Its out of your hands. Your only recourse is to try to stay employed. But we know that companies lay off people as part of their business strategies, many times regardless of your loyalty to the company. So its bad for you. Ok, so it must be good for employers right? Well, in some ways, yes. Benefits are a way of enticing employees to your company. It also acts to keep them loyal as well. But as the cost of that insurance has risen so has the burden of those benefits on the employer. As a result, many employers are trying to minimize the number of employees that have benefits. This has resulted in a rise in the temp/part-time employee, who work less hours and has little or no benefits. Because these employees have little to tie them to their job they are more likely to leave and hence companies see higher turnover, higher training costs and more time spent processing paperwork and interviewing for new hires. So would it not be best for both employers and employees to move to a system that gets away from this current employer-sponsored system. That way employers, especially small businesses, who do not have the same collective buying power of a large corporation and are thus at a disadvantage in the insurance market, can unburden themselves completely of the heavy costs of providing health insurance and focus more on other benefits to keep employees happy. Workers can then focus on creating a new system where they make the decisions on which insurance company that support instead of going with one that the employer has selected for them. The collective power of free agent insurance buyers will force greater accountability by having the flexibility to shop around in the market. More people will have access to insurance on their terms, dictated by their individual needs. Employers can take the savings and increase full time, permanent payrolls without the fear of being saddled with insurance issues. Employees can reward companies that provide better service, more choices and punish companies that refuse to pay out for needed care. So with these set of circumstances, and millions of potential insurance buyers looking for coverage why is there no independent health insurance market? Is the current employer based system keeping costs too high for independent insurance buyers? Why can't we have portability? Hasn't the time come to look at some reform of the current system that is failing? | |
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