So what would happen if all employer’s stopped contracting with health insurance carriers?
Would the system fall apart?
What moron decided it would be a good idea to tie health insurance to employment?* Why should those two go together? My car insurance doesn’t come with my job.
Yeah, yeah, I get the “but healthy employees are good for the company bottom line”…but are you sure about that? Does providing health insurance to your employees even help the bottom line?
The point of insurance is to pool risk. I suppose that a business is just as good as any other place to cultivate that risk pool. But why can’t the insurance business operate like the car insurance business? Pool risk from the public at large.
If you unraveled the health care industry from employers, wouldn’t they be able to spend more on employee wages and salaries thus putting cash back into the working man’s pocket allowing the working man to purchase his own insurance plan? That would give the working man…Gasp…choice! Such a dirty word.
Could I ask a few more rhetorical questions?
*Those Blue Cross folks at Baylor in the 1920’s probably get the nod for the prepaid business of health care–but the “HMO” existed for a decade or two prior to that.
I think you’re right on.
Now the government just has to pass legislation that gives all healthcare the same tax treatment. How hard could that be?
First, this form needs much better labels. nobody wants to guess what very tiny little icons mean for required fields.
As for why health insurance is tied to employment, I offer you tes story as it was told to me: during WWII, wages were essentially fixed, and companies needed a way to keep their best and brightest but couldn’t give raises, so ‘benefits’ like healthcare began to be given by employers.
I’m not terribly sanguine that individuals / families could drive a better insurance bargain from BCBS than GE could. I think there will still be a need for either a pool or a very strictly regulated market with defined benefits, very limited pre-existing exclusions (or coverage, depending on the price).
Hmmm…you’re right Grunt. I have never not been logged in–so I rarely see the icons. Dangit…now I gotta go code some more.
You’re basically right about the fixed wages thing. I believe the depression had a say in that as well. But once wages were no longer fixed, seems like the system could have gone away. But it didn’t–and now the insurance companies have 50 years of bargaining power.
Strange system.
Heh, very very temporary comment fix until I have time to do something better.
For the record…I think health insurance is crap. I recently learned that you can’t ever get hold of exactly what your policy covers (ie a book of what IS and is NOT covered) because it’s considered “proprietary” and doing so would violate “trade secrets.” How’s THAT for fair?