Health Uninsurance Rising in America

[weacross3]

Originally Posted by mayor

The pharmaceutical industry is BIG BIG business and I believe, extremely corrupt. I think there are reasonable cures for cancer and other major diseases, but the job of the pharmaceutical industry is to sell drugs, whether they help or not.

Sadly, I think it's true. I have Multiple Sclerosis. I take a drug called Rebif (injections 3 times a week). One month's supply is $1400 for a drug that I will need to take for the rest of my life!!! Where's the incentive to find a cure?

Luckily for me, the drug company offers financial assistance for poor people like me

[luvmetender]

Originally Posted by weacross3

Sadly, I think it's true. I have Multiple Sclerosis. I take a drug called Rebif (injections 3 times a week). One month's supply is $1400 for a drug that I will need to take for the rest of my life!!! Where's the incentive to find a cure?

Luckily for me, the drug company offers financial assistance for poor people like me

The pharmacy companies are NOT the people who are trying to find a cure. They are the people who are trying to control the disease while a cure can be found. Am I wrong??

[mayor]

Originally Posted by luvmetender

Yes, and the most reasonable cure for cancer is not to smoke. Are you saying it is up to the pharmaceutical firm to find a cure for cancer for people who willingly smoke?

I'm not sure if this question was for me or someone else. I agree with you agree wholeheartedly. Stop smoking! Got liver problems? Stop drinking!

But, there are diseases which just happen.. not the fault of the person who gets the disease.

Is it UP to the pharmaceutical companies? Well, no. But do they want to be the one to find the cure? It depends how much money is in it, I suppose.

Mayor

[mrbowler]

Just a article which relates to OP:

Health Insurance Costs Rise Faster Than Wages:

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[mrbowler]

State governments are fighting back-hey they don't want to pay for Insurance(health care)/public assistance/medicaid.

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Wal-Mart ruling shakes businesses:

A new Maryland law requiring Wal-Mart Stores to spend more on employee health care sent shudders Friday through the business community while emboldening labor's campaign to enact similar measures in states around the country.

Wal-Mart is an easy target because of its size and wage-and-benefit programs, which critics say are stingy and force too many workers and their children into state insurance programs.

But Maryland's law--which requires companies with 10,000 or more workers to spend at least 8 percent of their payrolls on health care--goes well beyond an attack on Wal-Mart, supporters and opponents of the measure agreed.

For the business community, the legislation opens the door to more interference in employer benefits and, perhaps, edges the country closer to a government-run health-care system. Neither prospect is acceptable, business leaders said.

For labor and its supporters, Maryland's law could help trim the ranks of people with no health insurance, reduce spiraling costs for public health programs and create a more level playing field between employers that offer good benefits and those that don't.

At least 12 states from California to Pennsylvania have considered legislation requiring employers to provide health benefits or contribute to state programs for uninsured workers.

The measures were defeated in six states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

While not a new idea, bills proposing employer-mandated medical coverage in the past asked all but the very smallest businesses to contribute something. Singling out very large employers for a mandate is a more recent approach.

Maryland legislators' vote late Thursday to override a gubernatorial veto reenergizes organized labor's campaign to introduce so-called "fair share" laws in 32 states including Illinois.

"What the Maryland victory shows is that the tide is turning because working people are not just fed up--they are ready to get active to set our country in a different direction, one state at a time," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a statement Friday.

In Illinois, where other health-care reform measures are pending, observers don't expect a bill to be introduced during the current legislative session.

But the issue is likely to resurface here in October, which is the deadline for a state-mandated report that will list Illinois employers with 50 or more workers on Medicaid.

Nineteen states have produced reports tallying the public costs of uninsured workers, company by company. In every state but Massachusetts, Wal-Mart, by virtue of the size of its workforce, topped the list.

An internal company memo released by Wal-Mart executives last year following a New York Times report disclosed that the low-cost retailer has a higher-than-average percentage of workers on public-assistance programs.

Five percent of Wal-Mart associates are on Medicaid compared with an average 4 percent for national employers, the memo said. And 27 percent of their children are on Medicaid compared with a 22 percent national average. In all, 46 percent of all children of Wal-Mart associates were on Medicaid or uninsured, the company's memo said.

Still, health-care experts say laws targeting big employers are misguided because large companies are far more likely than small ones to offer insurance.

Ninety-eight percent of companies with 200 or more workers offered health insurance last year, while only 59 percent of smaller employers did, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Retailers were far less likely than most other employers to offer health-care benefits, the report indicated. Retail wages also tend to be lower than in many other industries and "it's hard for workers to pay for health-care benefits at these salaries, even if the benefits are offered," said Gary Claxton, a vice president at the Kaiser Foundation.

For companies such as Wal-Mart, "the question is, where is the money to spend more on health-care benefits going to come from?" Claxton observed. "If they take it out of payroll, workers may get higher benefits but lower wages," he said.

"The fundamental problem here is we have an employer-based system of providing health insurance that's voluntary," said Alan Weil, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy. "If we're going to start telling employers that they have to offer this benefit, we need an overall plan of where we want to go and how we're going to get there. And this (Maryland) legislation doesn't do that."

Business groups said government mandates would hurt U.S. companies' ability to compete globally, and they added that fair share laws would move the country closer to a national health insurance system.

"This is the AFL-CIO's attempt to get national health care by the back door and on the cheap," Neil Trautwein, an officer at the National Association of Manufacturers, said in a statement Friday.

"We think that mandating (employer health benefits) is not a solution to the broken health care system," said John Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, which represents corporate chief executives. "What we need to do is reduce costs and increase the availability of (health) coverage by making it more affordable."

Groups such as Washington-based Wal-Mart Watch, a labor-backed coalition, said remedies such as the Maryland bill are needed to stop employers such as Wal-Mart from driving down benefits for everyone.

[mrbowler]

Originally Posted by mrbowler

The problem is that Corporations are slowly getting rid of Health Insurance or not providing at all. So doesn't that leave either the Individual or the Government footing the bill? IMO it's just another way of corporate america the opportunity to be more globally competitive at the expense of either the individual or the government.

Just a follow up to my earlier statement:

Fewer employers offer health benefits: study

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Fewer U.S. employers are offering health benefits, mostly because many new small employers have chosen not to pay for health insurance, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported on Monday.

The GAO found an 8 percentage point drop in the share of small employers offering benefits from 2001 to 2006 and said many employers that offer health benefits now make workers pay a higher share of out-of-pocket costs.

Some also have begun offering consumer-directed health plans, which trade lower premiums for significantly higher deductibles, or mini-medical plans that provide more limited coverage at lower premiums, the GAO said.

"While the share of large employers offering health benefits remained fairly constant between 2001 and 2006 at about 98 percent, the share of small employers (with 3-199 employees) offering them dropped from 68 percent to 60 percent," the GAO said in its report

Health policy experts from one organization we interviewed told us this decline is likely due to new employers choosing not to offer coverage rather than existing employers dropping coverage," the GAO added.

"Some of these recent changes to health benefits may particularly affect low-wage workers who are less able to afford higher out-of-pocket costs, and less healthy workers who use more health services," added the GAO, which wrote the report at the request of Congress.

The workers losing coverage are probably those the least likely to be able to bargain for it, the GAO found. "Survey data indicate that from 2001 through 2005, eligibility for health coverage and the extent to which workers are covered have both declined most among low-wage workers," it said.

At least 46 million Americans have no health insurance at all. Government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid provide health insurance for the poor, disabled and elderly

[mrbowler]

Yep another study

I did not check to see who funded the Commonwealth Fund-after all everything today is subjected to tainting of information/facts/etc. If you
don't believe-you have to discredit the source

Thought I would post-after all you always read/hear arguements about how much better the current system is compared to the socialistic(universal health care).


U.S. healthcare expensive, inefficient: report
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"Americans get the poorest health care and yet pay the most compared to five other rich countries, according to a report released on Tuesday.
Germany, Britain, Australia and Canada all provide better care for less money, the Commonwealth Fund report found"

"The group has consistently found that the United States, the only one of the six nations that does not provide universal health care, scores more poorly than the others on many measures of health care"

[mrbowler]

Anyone have any experience with any of the states listed in the article?

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The report found a strong link between access to health care coverage, particularly insurance, and high quality care. The top five ranked states were Hawaii, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine.

Of those, Hawaii, Vermont and Maine have enacted laws to move toward total coverage, whether through employer mandates or other means.


The five worst-performing states were Oklahoma, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas and Nevada. On average nearly 90 percent of working-age adults have insurance coverage in the top five states, versus roughly 75 percent adults insured in the bottom five states.

[FUNdamental]

Originally Posted by mayor

As much as I hate rising costs of insurance, health insurance is NOT a right! We have the right to:

Life
Liberty
The PURSUIT of happiness

The whole health insurance "crisis" is a big sham designed to turn over the health care industry to the government so they can have more control and make things even worse.

For the record, MY employer does NOT provide health insurance. I must PAY FOR IT out of my own pocket.

Mayor

Psssssst....Mayor,
We already have experience turning our healthcare over to the government, and it is working pretty well, thank you very much; we call it "Medicare." Ever heard of it? If you are eligible, you have "the right" to have it. By the way, those that make it to age 65 in this country have a longer average life expectancy than those in any other country of the world. Interesting, when we have subsidized available medicine and medical treatments under the system of Medicare in this country we get longer lives.

Mayor, are you against longer lives, and are you against Medicare?

Doesn't the Bible tell you to chose life over death?

I am sorry your employer didn't provide health insurance, perhaps you need to look for another job, or move to Canada, France, or the UK.