Workers Mull Private Health Insurance

This article is about and interesting trend. Now that insurance premiums are going up for employer sponsored health insurance plans, more employees are required to pay more for their medical insurance. Years ago the employer would pay for all of the premiums for the employee and his or her family. Now the employer rates have gone up, the out of pocket for the employee has gone up as well.

So this article points out that many people are opting for their own personal private health insurance plans to save money. These plans are available through brokers locally or online at sites like this one health insurance. You can compare different programs on your own and choose the premium and benefits that fits your own needs rather than be stuck with what the employer chooses. Sponsored by Blue Advantage. Enjoy the article.

As Health-Care Costs Rise, More Workers Considering Private Medical Insurance

NEW YORK (Associated Press) - For years, if an employer offered health insurance to a worker, the worker generally took it.

Now some workers are for the first time entertaining another option: private health insurance. Some employees, particularly those at smaller companies, are finding it's cheaper to get spouses and children covered by private policies than under their employers' plans.

A decade of inflation-topping health-care cost increases and the fact that employees are now picking up a larger slice of the bill through higher premiums and greater out-of-pocket expenses are behind the trend.

"If you are healthy, there are powerful economic incentives to see if you can strike a better deal on your own," says Alwyn Cassil, a spokeswoman for the Center for Studying Health System Change.

Continue this article here.

BLUMNER: Universal health care would be a boon to the free market

This is a very good article because it looks at health care in a way that I would normally disagree with. The main premise is that Universal Health Care would actually boost the private sector through mandated coverage individually. He attacks Rudy's concept that America's system is just fine and does not need work because it healed him from prostate cancer. The main line that scares me about this article is this one. . .

If the next president does nothing else but add this country to the pantheon of advanced nations that provide universal coverage, it will be a successful tenure, one that will be remembered fondly by generations to come, like that of FDR for Social Security and LBJ for Medicare.

The reason this is a poor argument for universal health care is that Social Security and Medicare are albatross problems for future generations. We think of them as good things now, but both of those programs are poorly designed to meet the country's needs. Any universal health care proposal that looks to SS and Medicare as models of government efficiency is doomed to fail.

He goes over the ideas that many people are stuck in their jobs because it is the only way that they can get benefits. He also goes over the fact that 1500 dollars of the cost of domestic cars goes to health care costs. The author tries to justify moving to a mandated individual health care coverage system and do away with the employer system that we currently have.

I don't necessarily agree, but I'm not in disagreement with the author either. Enjoy the article.

Rudy Giuliani has been called ''Bush with brains'' by those who fear that the former New York City mayor shares a penchant for unbridled executive power. But the Republican presidential primary frontrunner seems to have a screw loose when it comes to campaigning. His attack of Hillary Clinton's health care proposal with the bugaboo of European-style ''socialized'' medicine is not only full of factual holes, but it will surely bite him in the butt if he makes it to the general election.
Americans were taken in by health insurance industry foils Harry and Louise the first time Clinton offered this country decent health care reform, but they won't be fooled again. If Giuliani wants to make this election a referendum on America's health care system, he's going to flame out faster than a hospital can dump an uninsured patient.
Polls regularly show that Americans are disgusted with the current state of affairs. In a 2007 CBS News/New York Times poll, nine in 10 respondents said the U.S. health care system needs fundamental changes and two-thirds said it was up to the federal government to guarantee that all Americans have health care coverage.

Continue reading the article here.

Heritage Foundation: Health Care on the Brink

This article goes over the issues regarding the SCHIP battle as it relates to government health care as a whole. The author points out that during Hillary Clinton's attempt to create a universal tax payer provided health care program, they concluded that the best way to do that was incrementally through segments of the population starting with the children first. The rally cry behind the debate of the necessity of federal programs like these is that there are 47 million people in America without health insurance. The problem with arguing that the SCHIP program helps solve that is that the expanded SCHIP program proposed by congress would move 77% of those eligible from private health insurance to taxpayer insurance. Therefore it doesn't solve the problem of giving people without insurance coverage, it just mandates that the government (taxpayers) pay it.

This is a good article by a congressman from Oklahoma for the Heritage Foundation. I agree with everything in it. It concludes with a quote from Hillary Clinton that 'When I am elected president we are going to get universal health care.' She tried it once. Let's hope for the sake of the children who will have to find a way to pay for this program long after the current congress people are gone that that does not happen. Enjoy the article.

By Ernest Istook

The debate over government-run health care has roiled for decades. Today, we’re at the tipping point.

Incremental growth in public health programs has brought us to the brink. Today, almost half of America’s children — 45 percent — have their health care paid for by taxpayers. The children’s health bill (SCHIP) now before Congress would boost this to 55 percent. And that’s the tipping point.

Once most children are covered by taxpayers, the remaining children will shortly follow. Then their parents. Then those with no children at home. Eventually, the whole country would be under Washington-run health care, using tax dollars to pay the bills.

Even without a megabillion-dollar SCHIP expansion, taxpayers already pick up the tab for almost half the health care in America, via Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Administration. The SCHIP expansion could tip that, too, so the majority of all health care — not just kids’ care — is government-paid and therefore government-controlled.

Continue reading this article here.

Health Care Excuses

Here we have an opinion piece by an author for the New York Times. He tries to go over some excuses that people use when they say our system is pretty good despite the fact that our life expectancy is less than other countries with different medical systems. Other factors including the size and diversity differences between the countries are always ignored by people like this author.

He points out four different 'excuses' that people against the government paying for health insurance use and tries to explain why they are wrong. The first part of the article where he makes fun of President Bush saying that everyone gets health insurance when they go to the emergency room. The fact of the matter is that everyone knows this - even illegal aliens. It is against the law to deny someone health care in an emergency room. In the article he claims it means that they qualify for Medicaid if they don't have insurance when they arrive in the emergency room. Most people in the Hispanic population WILL NOT purchase health insurance because this is their mantra. If they get sick, they will just go to the emergency room and get care for free. This author does not know this. He probably doesn't talk to many Hispanics about health care.

The second excuse he makes fun of is the fact that people's lifestyle choices are to blame for the high cost of health care. We are in fact the fattest country on the planet. The poorer the group, the fatter they are. Obesity contributes to diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and early deaths. All of these issues other than early death are extremely expensive for our health care system to treat on a chronic basis. If you add our large population of homosexuals and include their expensive drugs needed for contracting AIDS at a much higher than normal level, and you would have to assume that lifestyle choices at least contributes to our high cost of health care.

Then he says that all claims against socialized medicine are wrong because of . . . Medicare. That's right, Medicare will solve all of our health care problems according to this author. He doesn't mention that the system is going broke and probably won't be available by the time I turn 65. He doesn't mention that the government is trying to privatize Medicare as fast as they can through a Medicare Advantage system. He doesn't mention that doctors are turning away Medicare patients because their reimbursement rate is too low for their services. Other than that, Medicare is a perfect example of a good socialized medicine program.

Anyway, this author is wrong, but I will link to his article and let you decide. This is the problem with the debate though. People don't understand where the actual problems are. They claim to be knowledgeable when they really don't know. Enjoy this article. I certainly got a laugh out of reading this 'smart guy's' misinterpretation of the problem.

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The United States spends far more on health care per person than any other nation. Yet we have lower life expectancy than most other rich countries. Furthermore, every other advanced country provides all its citizens with health insurance; only in America is a large fraction of the population uninsured or underinsured.

You might think that these facts would make the case for major reform of America’s health care system — reform that would involve, among other things, learning from other countries’ experience — irrefutable. Instead, however, apologists for the status quo offer a barrage of excuses for our system’s miserable performance.

So I thought it would be useful to offer a catalog of the most commonly heard apologies for American health care, and the reasons they won’t wash.

Continue reading the article here.

47 million Americans lack health insurance: report

This article from Reuters goes over the statistic that all of the politicians use in detail. It points out the rise in the number of uninsured since the year 2000. It attempts to come up with reasons why so many people don't have insurance. This number is mostly a guess, but it is probably fairly accurate (within 10 million or so). It is sort of like guessing how many illegal aliens are in the country. I think the article is good enough for a post so enjoy it.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The number of Americans lacking health insurance rose by nearly 8.6 million to 47 million from 2000 to 2006, with children and workers from every income level losing coverage, a new report said on Thursday.

The increase was "driven primarily by the continued erosion in employer-provided health insurance," said the report by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute.

In 2006, 2.3 million fewer Americans received health benefits from their employers than in 2000, the report said, noting the decline does not take the population increase into account.

Nearly 60 percent of the nation's children are covered by the insurance provided by their parents' employers, but 3.4 million fewer children had benefits in 2006 compared with 2000.

Continue reading this article here.

Health Care Problems Exaggerated?

This article is a blogpost by the author of 'Economics and. . . ' blog from today. This post is well written and I agree with everything he says. He indicates that the issue is not whether or not it is a right. The issue is not whether or not the government should pay for it. The problem with the health care system is that we already have a government that has promised more services than it can deliver. Before we start promising more services, we need to figure out how we can deliver on the promises that we have already given. While it is important that we provide coverage for the poorest of Americans, Medicaid is designed for that. Apart from that, the system where the coverage is provided by the employer works pretty well. Those that don't have access to employer sponsored coverage generally have access to an individual plan. He theorizes that the problem becomes when people who do not have the option to get employer coverage and also don't have any individual coverage available due to a medical condition. It is a well written post and I hope you enjoy reading it.

Economics and. . .

I’m a bit confused by Greg Mankiw’s latest blog post on the subject of health care. He seems to be arguing that, aside from redistribution issues and the perception of rising prices, the problem is relatively minor. (“...the magnitude of the problems we face are often exaggerated by those seeking more sweeping reforms...”) I suppose Greg regards the actuarial insolvency of the Medicare system as a problem of smaller magnitude than those alleged by reformers, or perhaps as a purely demographic problem that is only nominally related to the health care issue. But it seems to me, if the government has made a commitment to pay for certain things, the fact that the prices of those things are rising rapidly – regardless of whether quality is rising faster than prices – is a big problem.

I agree with Greg’s contention (in his New York Times piece) that it can be perfectly rational to spend a larger and larger fraction of our income on health care, but that doesn’t change the fact that, under current institutional arrangements, figuring out how to pay for it is a big, big problem. To put my point a little differently, those “pundits of the left” who pretend to be concerned about the health care system but really have a redistribution agenda, they would seem to be holding some pretty good cards right now, given that the government has already promised more free health care than it will be able to deliver under current fiscal arrangements.

When Greg asks the question, “What health reform would you favor if the reform were required to be distribution-neutral?” it is impossible to answer without making an assumption about how the distributions will be worked out under the current system.

Continue reading the blog post here.

CNN's Money 101 : 10 things you need to know about health insurance

Here is an article from CNN that goes in depth about things you might need to think about before you purchase a policy. I will post the 10 most important things here, but you really need to go to the link I provide to the article to get an in depth analysis of things you need to look for. I like this article and agree with it. Enjoy

Top things to know about Money

In Lesson 16 - Health Insurance

1. Insurance costs a lot but having none costs more.
2. If your employer offers insurance, grab it.
3. Comparing plans is tough but necessary.
4. The lowest premium isn't always the cheapest plan.
5. Even good coverage can have big loopholes.
6. You'll pay more for freedom.
7. You can check out networks before signing up.
8. You can keep your insurance if you lose your job.
9. Working couples have more to think about.
10. Tax breaks can help.

Continue to the full article here.