LessGovMrPrez

Well most part-time employees dont get coverage of any kind.


I tried to find some quick links for you to look at on this here is 2 I found, I will keep searching for more, I have a book at home I will have to look back through so I can find the Acts and what not, and google them for you to see also. But here is 2 I found real quick:

Office of Price Administration: Information and Much More from Answers.com

This first one is about the Stabilization Act of 1942. It basically froze companies from offering higher wages. So what they did instead is gave employers the incentive to get tax deductions on health insurance for its employees. Which led to what we have today. There is more to it, but I will have to get more links first..lol. That is just the nutshell mostly.

An Introduction to the Health Care Crisis in America: How Did We Get Here?
This 2nd link, more or less says the same thing. I pulled out the main part concerning the beginning of employer based coverage here:

"......Responding to the inflationary pressures of a wartime economy, the federal government imposed wage and price controls to prevent employers from raising wages in order to compete for scarce labor. While stripping them of their power to increase wages, the 1942 Stabilization Act allowed employers to expand their benefit offerings. By permitting employers to offer health insurance to their employees, the government provided private insurers with a new market for their products.[15] In the years that followed, the government passed several additional rulings that reinforced the efforts of insurance companies to link health insurance with employment and institutionalized the employment-based system of health insurance that exists today.

The first piece of legislation, passed by the War Labor Board in 1945, ruled that employers could not change or cancel an employee’s insurance plan during the contract period. The second ruling, which became law in 1949, mandated that benefits should be considered part of the compensation package so that unions could haggle over both wages and health insurance in their contract negotiations. Finally, in 1954, the IRS decided that workers would not be taxed on the contributions that their employers made to their health insurance plans.[16] This preferential tax treatment for “fringe” benefits gave businesses an incentive to offer health insurance to their employees.

In sum, employer-provided health insurance, as an institution, emerged during the two decades following WWII. The system is a legacy of Roosevelt’s decision not to pursue universal health insurance in the 1930s. The decision has been called “an early triumph of a vision championed by modern conservatives, in which the private sector in the United States fulfills essential social responsibilities assumed by governments in most other industrialized nations” (Blumenthal, 2006, p. 83). As one would imagine, the private sector’s ability to fulfill these responsibilities depends crucially on the economic fortunes of its business sector....."

We are basically still using law that was constructed during a war economy (which can be dangerous for other reasons not mentioned here). By creating the incentives for companies to provide coverage, the government basically made it impossible to find coverage on the open markets. It is the government's way of pushing it closer to themselves, where they have more say in it. I want to say like 9% of individuals get coverage outside of a job, compared to nearly 60% who do get it in a job. Government coverage is somewhere around 25%.

Compare this to Hillary's UHC, where she is saying she will garnish wages if you dont get on it, and you can see how government can push people into it without ever really having to outright pass a law saying so. They will just make it inconveniant to go out and get it yourself by mudding the waters with all kinds of hoops to jump through, in the hope that people will just get fed up and go with the government run stuff instead (this is basically where we are at now with employer based coverage, they have stimed the free market enough to where enough individuals wont go out get their own). It is pretty slick and smart but the very fact that they wont come right out and pass a law saying what they want to do, is in and of itself corrupt.

If I remember, I will post more links for you to look at. But I hope this gives some historical context to why we are where we are.

FRYandBENDER

I say we have a compromise. As someone who believes that government screws up everything it is involved in I would like to see all government involvement in market health care to stop. So, lets put it to a test. Lets have the government have separate, government provided, health care for those who wish to use it and at the same time have the government release any and all influence it has on market health care. The government says they can do it better. Lets let them prove it.

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Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars. ... I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask no one to live for me, nor do I live for others. I covet no mans soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.

Ayn Rand, Anthem.

Common insult examples and how to avoid them

LessGovMrPrez

Great idea! Can we do the same for education too?

AzTeK

Thnx for looking that stuff up for me LessGov. As I have no idea what I should look for, I, again, really appreciate it

Why did the government cap wages? I mean, higher wages mean higher spending poiwer mean faster economic growth, right?

Summed up, Government provided incentives for businesses to privde benefits through insurance for employers while not (being allowed to) raise/raising wages. Since insurance companies saw that there was big $ to be made in this sector, they sort of drove prices in the private market up so that in the end the only alternative was to get insured through your employer - am I following this correctly?

Still, the whole system is based on companies actually paying less (through tax incentives for insurances) than they would if they just raised the pay of their employees - but as we are seeing now (the most obvious example being GM), companies end up getting the shaft just as much as private persons. So why don't companies stop providing insurance for their employees (whenever their contract is renegotiated, since they can't change the insurance plan while it is still valid) and instead raise pays relative to what insurance would have been costing.

This would force the insurance market to provide deals for individuals, and voila, we have lower prices through higher competition. I see how the problem emmerged, but I don't see how the free market should not be able to get out of it. I see why during wartime, companies resorted to high compensation packages (since they werent allowed to increaes wages), but why should they now? This is the free market that sort of voluntarily got itself into this mess (by jumping onto the preferential tax treatment that was offered if they provided healthcare for employees). Obviously this backfired and insurance costs rose, which led to companies paying more than they would have if they hadn't made that mistake in the first place. So why don't they just stop?

How come the healthcare industry can come up with ways to influence an entire country, while big companies like GM, Ford, GE and whatnot can't pull themselves together to act against it? After all, it's also them paying for it in a big part.

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LessGovMrPrez

BINGO! The government got involved and created the environment for it.

We are operating, today on a war time economy plan. If we really want to get into it, look at FDR's proposals while in office. As a progressive president, he did alot of things that were basically government takeovers. There are alot of things his adminstration did, that we are still paying for today. The current healthcare cluster, social security, etc.

Litigation is key. Look at companies that want to get rid of their employer based coverages, and watch unions sue them over it.

I didnt get a chance this weekend to go through my book I have at home, but if you are interested in it, it is called "The Cure". It gives the beginning of the current system and its progression to today. It is written by a Canadien Doctor who came here after being in Canada's universal coverage system.

He gives some awesome background into the current system, I just cant remember it all.

But the underlying factor in all this, is the government, through war, created our current state of affairs in this industry. And we need to get out of it and fast. Companies wont be able to in the long run continue down their current path. They are footing the bills for hundreds or thousands of employees and it is eating them up, along with pensions.

I want ot see exactly, what you said above, about: That is where we get to deal with insuranec directly, instead of insurance dealing through multi-million dollar companies for premiums. There is no way insurance companies could charge the same amounts to individuals, as they can charge to a huge company. Prices would have to drop in order for them to stay afloat. And they could start by stopping coverage for the routine doctor visits and what not. I have done rounds with my brother adn sister-in-laws, who are both doctors in their own clinic, and 90% of the patients who come in, are basic needs type stuff. Runny noses, bruises, coughs, aches, etc. Out of a single day, in his clinic, there was probably 2 or 3 people all day, each day for the week I was there, that actually needed to see a doctor. Even at the ER, it wa pretty much the same kind of thing. But every time these patients came in, they charged it to insurance. Multiply that millions of times a day, nationwide and you can guess the amounts being spent on it. It could really drop premium costs big time if we just paid out of pocket for the basic visit. It is really no different then going to an optomtrist once every 6 months for contacts and a check up at a Wal-Mart store. It might be $100 total every 6 months.

AzTeK

So basically, the people are screwing themselves through their representatives (unions)?

Excuse me if I missed it, but is there nowadays anything appart from the tax incentives that would make a company offer health insurance over a higher pay?

Neways, if I got this right you have companies that were persuaded into institutionalising employer-based-healthcare, and now you have unions preventing these companies from getting out of it. You keep saying you want the government out of it, but is there anything the government can do appart from severely restricting insurance companies (not allowing them to deny insurance, capping premiums, etc.) to fix it? Which, in terms, would mean more government involvement, at least mid-term.

Is the authors name Henning Behrens by any chance? Unfortunately they don't seem to have it at Amazon.at, but I'll keep an eye open for it. Thnx for the suggestion.


Do you think this is any different in the US than elsewhere in the world?

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AzTeK

Sorry for not answering in so long, have been sick lying in bed for almost a week

Still, LessGoV, I was wondering if you could answer my my question.

What can the Government do to "get out" and fix the problem, eventhough as you say all the problems come from measures that range back to WW2 and seem so entrenched that they would probably continue even if the government reppealed all laws that formerly were thought as incentives for employer-provided healthcare?

Should it do it the other way around? Shortly give tax-incentives for raising pay instead of non pecuniary benefits?

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cogito

I'd like to offer a different perspective.

First of all any individual in the United States has the opportunity to purchase private individual/family health insurance.

The problem is that it is quite costly.

There are many reasons why health care is so expensive in the US. Our culture tends to favor heroic measures utilizing very costly technology in efforts to save or prolong lives which, sadly, are often futile. It is a fact that the majority of health care expenses in the US are accrued in the terminal phase of illness. Consider also our sophisticated neonatal intensive care units that many times create technology-dependent or institutionalized patients. We are simply, as a society, unwilling to pull the plug, so to speak. Our tort system exacerbates this phenomenon. In socialized medicine these issues don't exist because of allocation guidelines. For example patients above a certain age are withheld lifesaving services like dialysis; and premature infants below a certain weight don't get resuscitated.

Another problem is that I believe the health insurance industry does operate as a cartel quite INDEPENDENT of government. Payments to doctors and hospitals have been going down steadily, while premiums have been rising. The insurance companies are making record profits and the salaries of their officers are unconscionable, particularly in view of the rising morbidity of the underinsured. Whether you believe in the cartel theory or not, it is an undeniable fact that the opeating costs of private insurers are far greater than Medicare.

AzTeK

I've never heard of any case where that happened. Do you have any sources to back that up? Doctors have, per job definition, the obligation to do everything in their power to save their patients lives. It's no different in a socialist system.

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cogito

The practice of rationing health care in socialized medicine should come as no surprise. I don't have the time to try to document the policies of various governments. Consider these:

Experience with rationing health care in New Zealand

Intensive Care for Very Low Birthweight Infants in South Africa: A Survey of Physician Attitudes, Parent Counseling and Resuscitation Practices -- Partridge et al., 10.1093/tropej/fmh066 -- Journal of Tropical Pediatrics