According to an article in the Business section of the Burlington Free Press today, members of Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility called on the legislature to shift the cost of health care to the government and away from them (the business).
The article opens with the sob story moving account of one factory in Northfield that had to ask employees to pay 7% of their health insurance premiums, due to rising costs.
The company’s cost is now $320,000 a year for 39 employees and 52 family members. Wall said that’s greater than rent, electricity and fuel at the factory.
Wow! That’s a big expense. Bigger than rent, electricity and fuel combined?
But what is $320,000 divided by 39 employees?
$8205 per year, per employee.
I am going to go out on a limb here and say there is another expense at this factory that is greater than rent, electricity, fuel, and health insurance combined.
Wages.
How about a little honesty here, folks?
The reality is that health insurance is a part of the compensation package that employers offer their employees. Compensation is the largest expense for businesses.
And if the above employer was paying that extra $8205 in wages, that money would be subject to the payroll taxes, costing the company even more money.
I am not opposed to the de-coupling of health insurance from employment.
As someone who has been self-employed, I would like to see the health care solution include making health insurance plans more affordable to people who are not traditionally employed.
What I am opposed to are the emotionally-charged red herrings that are frequently thrown out in order to confuse the issue.
Health care is expensive. Health insurance is expensive. Shifting the cost to a different payer will not fix the problem.
The irony of ironies being that it is likely the cost will be shifted away from the businesses, only to be shifted back to them in the form of taxes.
What is that going to do to solve the problem?
Why is health insurance expensive and how can we make it cost less?
Honestly, does anyone on the left have any interest in answering those questions?
January 30th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Well, duh, Charity. Many have answered those questions, you’re just not listening. Healthcare is so friggin’ expensive because of the paperwork, inefficiency and other fiascos that the private health industry foists upon us. They’re in the business of making money, and the only way they can do that is by denying claims. If you shift the management to a system that can run it more efficiently such as the gov’t, costs would go down.
January 30th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Slowly but surely, businesses are realizing that they are in for a never-ending, spiraling out-of-control, roller coaster ride when it comes to paying for their employees health care premiums. The sooner we solve the health care crisis in this country…the sooner we’ll help businesses all across this nation with their bottom-line and employees with their take-home pay. What a lot of businesses are slowly realizing is that they will end up paying less overall for having their employees health care covered through taxes than through paying for it themselves. I think there is just simple math going on here…math that I doubt many “conservatives” will freely acknowledge.
Health care is expensive because not everyone in this country is insured and there’s a cost shift that’s made because those that can’t pay for health care and those that can. Health care is expensive because there’s a massive amount of money that’s wasted in overhead costs trying to figure out who’s going to pay for what and why. Health care is expensive because people wait and don’t get the care that they need when they need it because there are afraid to pay a big health care bill…this part is a huge merry-go-round.
January 30th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I think there is just simple math going on here…math that I doubt many “conservatives” will freely acknowledge.
You mean like the Democrats in the California legislature that just “terminated” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “universal” health-care plan
The idea was that Mr. Schwarzenegger would set a national precedent, leading to a groundswell for reform in Washington. Not to mention that the Schwarzenegger plan was a near-copy of the one Mitt Romney pioneered in Massachusetts, and the one Hillary Clinton now favors. A leading author of the California plan was Laurie Rubiner, who directed health policy at the New America Foundation before becoming Senator Clinton’s legislative director in 2005.
And I like this bit
The California legislature is probably the most liberal this side of Vermont, and even Democrats refused to become shock troops for this latest liberal experiment.
Why you may ask was it terminated?
An independent analysis confirmed the plan would be far more expensive than proponents admitted. Even under the most favorable assumptions, spending would outpace revenue by $354 million after two years, and likely $3.9 billion or more. “A situation that I thought was bad,” Mr. Perata noted, “in fact was worse.”
This reveals that liberal health-care politics is increasingly the art of the impossible: You can’t make coverage “universal” while at the same time keeping costs in check — at least without prohibitive tax increases. Lowering cost and increasing access, in other words, are separate and irreconcilable issues.
And when you stry into thinking that Government would be more efficient than the private sector, force you self to remember the Walter Reed debacle…
January 30th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
LOL…if it was a “near-copy” of Romney’s MA slow disaster in progress, I don’t blame them for deep-sixing it. Mandating health care insurance coverage alone without making it affordable doesn’t work. This is because one of the main reasons that people don’t have health care coverage in the first place is because of the cost…when the govt. simply tries to help only the poor get health care, it gets expensive.
From what I understand, Hillary merely wants to give access to the FEHBP to every American, if they would like to participate in it. It’s the same extensive set of relatively-affordable, private health insurance plans that Congress and federal employees get access to now. It’s merely a first step towards universal coverge IMO. A true single payer system is the only way to get a lot of the costs (read that as profit) out of health care.
Walter Reed was the DOD at it’s “best”…a lot of the VA facilities aren’t very good, and the way that we’ve treated our veterans in this country is a shame. Cutting their combat pay, shitty rooms when they come home maimed from Iraq, then asking for their signing bonuses back because they can’t serve anymore without all their legs and arms. It makes me sick…
January 30th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Mister Guy
A true single payer system is the only way to get a lot of the costs (read that as profit) out of health care.
A single-payer, government run health care system is an awful solution to people (like me) who are not very interested in trusting government.
I, for one, simply do not understand why anyone would think allowing even the hint of a political agenda to be part of the the health care rationing calculus.
Didn’t work out well for people deemed non-Aryans in Nazi Germany.
Here are a few facts that I deem indisputable: We can not keep everyone alive forever.
We can not afford the demand to try to keep everyone alive forever.
Now when these facts are accepted, AND we decide that the Government should make policies on who gets how much health care when, I think we set ourselves on a very dangerous course.
For example, there is a branch of medical ethics known as Utilitarian Bioethics. It is not a fringe branch. It’s principles are stated thus:
[It] espouses directing medical resources where they will contribute most to the sum of the number of happy people in the world….
As with much of utilitarianism, Utilitarian Bioethics is internally coherent only if one takes as proven the concept that the economic distribution of resources is a zero-sum game. Then, it makes sense to evaluate society as the aggregate of each person’s total future economic value, their chance of survival from the present, and the cost of keeping them alive indefinitely. If we end up with too many people whose cost of medical maintenance outweighs their total future economic value (because they are terminally ill, are no longer productive, and have no reasonable chance of becoming productive in the foreseeable future), then it may be economically efficient to encourage them to voluntarily self-terminate in order to end their own suffering and to free up scarce medical resources. That is, there are only so many healthy people who can take care of the sick (and do all the other things that keep civilization running), and if there are simply too many unproductive sick people, then providing care for them will inevitably be detrimental to the healthy. To put this more bluntly, every nurse who spends their days caring for a terminally ill Alzheimer’s or cancer patient, a comatose individual, or for an individual in a vegetative state, is one more nurse who will not be taking care of a sick baby or a 12-year-old gunshot victim.
Now consider the Netherlands, which, of course, has Government run health care. And consider their so-called Groningen Protocol, whereby it is written that:
if doctors at the hospital think a child is suffering unbearably from a terminal condition, they have the authority to end the child’s life. The protocol is likely to be used primarily for newborns, but it covers any child up to age 12….
A parent’s role is limited under the protocol. While experts and critics familiar with the policy said a parent’s wishes to let a child live or die naturally most likely would be considered, they note that the decision must be professional, so rests with doctors.
Now you may trust Democrats, or may trust Republicans, at at some point, someone you don’t trust will be in charge of this mechanism.
Is this idea really appealing to you?
The Groningen Protocol is frightening in and of itself just by the fact that the Parent’s essentially have no say and no options. They can’t go somewhere else even if they had money. At least not in the Netherlands. If the doctors (i.e. the government) decide that the cost of medical maintenance outweighs their total future economic value that’s it, the kids a goner. And there is no appeal.
Now let’s say for the sake of argument (and I don’t think this is at all far-fetched) that part of government provided health care is comprehensive mental-health care.
And let’s further speculate a nefarious administration taking advantage of this to remove political miscreants.
Presto! You have a mechanism for re-education camps
There is something downright evil about a government making life and death choices that result in a dispassionate board deciding the terminal fate of an infant, or 12 year-old while the child’s parents cry and wail in frustration.
I suppose not everyone will see the difference, perhaps, but it is quite clear in my mind.
January 30th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Ah yes…the single payer health care system = Nazism argument. Now we’re talkin’…crazy talk that is…
“We can not afford the demand to try to keep everyone alive forever.”
I don’t remember anyone claiming that…strawman argument. Are you opposed to death with dignity laws too? What happened to the “freedom to choose” and all that jazz?
“We can not afford the demand to try to keep everyone alive forever.”
See above…also, we spend about twice what everyone else in the world spends on health care now…there’s plenty of money in the system right now. We are one of the richest countries in the world…we really *can* afford health care together. This isn’t Holland or the UK or Germany.
You have revealed yourself to be another right-wing “conservative” that fears his own govt….I feel sorry for you.
February 5th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Mister Guy
“We can not afford the demand to try to keep everyone alive forever.”
I don’t remember anyone claiming that…strawman argument.
It is not a strawman argument it is a postulate.
Are you opposed to death with dignity laws too?
Um, no. Why do you assume I am
What happened to the “freedom to choose” and all that jazz?
Love it. Jazz too.
“We can not afford the demand to try to keep everyone alive forever.”
See above
Again, not an argument but a postulate.
The idea is that given these two are self-evident truths, to whom do you want to give the power of determining life and death with regards to access to health care.
You have revealed yourself to be another right-wing “conservative” that fears his own govt
I see. So what am I to make of this statement. Are you defending the Groningen Protocol or not?
Am I to imply that you think that the Government of the Netherlands has betrayed the trust of their people and that could never happen here?
Or am I to imply that you think the Netherlands is on track with the Groningen Protocol and this type of thinking would be OK so long as the government authorized it?
February 5th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
“The idea is that given these two are self-evident truths, to whom do you want to give the power of determining life and death with regards to access to health care.”
No one is talking about ceding control for life and death to the govt….which is why your “postulates” are strawman arguments, period. This isn’t a rhetoric class BTW.
“So what am I to make of this statement?”
Whatever you would like to…BTW, this isn’t Holland…so screw the Groningen Protocol.
“Am I to imply that you think that the Government of the Netherlands has betrayed the trust of their people and that could never happen here?”
Now, we’re getting somewhere…you are quite thicked-headed aren’t you Frank?
February 5th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
“Am I to imply that you think that the Government of the Netherlands has betrayed the trust of their people and that could never happen here?”
Now, we’re getting somewhere…you are quite thicked-headed aren’t you Frank?
Clearly.
Especially since I am not in the “It can’t happen here” camp.
I mean, whodathunk that the Supreme Court would allow the use eminent domain to transfer land from one private owner to another to further economic development?
I can not see the justification for the “it can’t happen here” mindset.
February 5th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
“I can not see the justification for the ‘it can’t happen here’ mindset.”
That’s because your irrational fear overtakes your ability to see that this country is fundamentally different in the way that it is set up. The Founding fFathers knew what they were doing.