Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

What’s all this fighting about?, Pt.6 – Scare tactic or proof, let’s choose.

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The example was given by Ms. Pipes of the problem of low-wage hiring: “if you’re thinking about hiring a $24,000-a-year receptionist, the same health insurance policy is now a 50 percent premium [$12,000], you might decide it’s not worth it.” Forget about minimum-wage hiring, the employer would have to pay more then 100% of that person’s wages just as a penalty to the government for health insurance provisions. Perhaps all these calculations are just too complicated for some of us. But what we can understand is a good, shining example. Generally, when designing something new on a scale as large as a national health insurance/care system, we find it efficacious to start with a smaller model and do some testing first.

Certainly this was the case with Mr. Obama (and Hillary and the congressional sub-committees and the many non-profit consulting organizations, etc.) by studying the Massachusetts health insurance model. Though on a much smaller scale still, the numbers involved are formidable. In this plan, heavily referenced by Mr. O, the plan would be funded in a few different ways. One of those is that employers would be mandated to either provide health insurance to their workers, or else pay into the fund. This could be as high as 7% of payroll. It is expected that this will provide about $45 billion for the fund. (For a more complete review of these details, please refer to the article entitled “2nd Opinion on Health Insurance reform, Pt.3”.) How much effect would this statement have?

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