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The Boston Globe: Fewer companies offering health benefits as costs rise

The Boston Globe Fewer companies offering health benefits as costs rise

"As health insurance costs continue to spiral upward, fewer companies are offering health benefits to their employees, according to a national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

About 60 percent of companies nationwide offer health benefits to employees, compared to 69 percent in 2000, the survey found. Most of the companies that eliminated health benefits have fewer than 200 employees."

"The survey said premium costs are rising at about three times the rate of increase of the average worker's earnings and at about two-and-a-half times the rate of inflation."

BusinessWeek Health Care: More Money, Less Care
" All told, the U.S. will probably spend an estimated $1.9 trillion on health care in 2005, $100 billion more than the prior year. That's 15.7% of the gross domestic product. Despite such mammoth sums, hospitals will continue to struggle to stay solvent, employers will continue to face higher insurance premiums, employees will continue to shoulder a higher percentage of those premiums, and insurers -- well, insurers will continue to do very well, thank you, because they get to pass on their higher costs to the policy holders. Though not, of course, to the 45 million people who are uninsured -- 15.6% of the population.

At some point, and probably in the not-too-distant future, this level of spending will almost certainly become unsustainable."

The New Yorker The Moral-Hazard Myth
"The issue about what to do with the health-care system is sometimes presented as a technical argument about the merits of one kind of coverage over another or as an ideological argument about socialized versus private medicine. It is, instead, about a few very simple questions. Do you think that this kind of redistribution of risk is a good idea? Do you think that people whose genes predispose them to depression or cancer, or whose poverty complicates asthma or diabetes, or who get hit by a drunk driver, or who have to keep their mouths closed because their teeth are rotting ought to bear a greater share of the costs of their health care than those of us who are lucky enough to escape such misfortunes? In the rest of the industrialized world, it is assumed that the more equally and widely the burdens of illness are shared, the better off the population as a whole is likely to be. The reason the United States has forty-five million people without coverage is that its health-care policy is in the hands of people who disagree, and who regard health insurance not as the solution but as the problem."

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The Boston Globe: Fewer companies offering health benefits as costs rise

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