The CBO said: [...] Although both theory and evidence suggest that workers ultimately finance their employment-based insurance through lower take-home pay, the cost is not evident to many workers...If transparency increases and workers see how much their income is being reduced for employers’ contributions and what those contributions are paying for, there might be a broader change in cost-consciousness that shifts demand.[...]
Peter Singer wrote in the New York Times that the current exclusion of insurance premiums from compensation [i.e. it's deducted before the worker gets his paycheck--Ed.] represents a $200 billion subsidy for the private insurance industry and that it would likely not exist without it.
Of course, our income taxes and Social Security are deducted too.
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US insurance has a number of shortcomings compared to our Canadian version. Having seen both its high points and low points, I'm inclined to call it an 'awful mess' with a few 'glowing achievements'. Fixing it is the Devil's own nightmare, for whomever tries.
The first step would be 1,000 lobbyists and lawyers relocated to the sea-bottom.
I'm convinced higher health care premiums are not entirely financed by the worker. They are partly financed by the consumer in the form of higher prices.
On the other hand, once everybody is aboard, the system need not spend as much as 40% of its cost of operations *accounting for and arguing over who pays for what*. Your system has to be spectacularly more efficient to make up for that 40% chunk (compared to a 'government pays for it' scheme which removes a fair portion of this infighting).
Anyway, whatever you get will be a mess because they won't start and do a pilot from scratch using best practices in some small areas and then evaluate, modify, etc. and then deploy nationally.
Instead, they'll draft the whole shebang from scratch, build it on top of today's shaky foundations, and then deploy it nationally to a huge and nightmarish result.
God have mercy on your souls.
You know, if we were designing a country to our own specifications, we could have little semi-independent sub-countries--"provinces", or maybe "states"--and if these subcountries wanted to, they could try different plans and see which ones actually worked.
A pipe dream, I know--who would ever organize a country like that?
Apparently, no one alive today.
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