Will Rising Costs Make Medical Coverage Tougher To Find?April, 2007
This month, in an unplanned but telling coincidence, Cover the Uninsured Week coincided with Small Business Week, making for a logical analysis of
small business health insurance and the condition of medical coverage as it affects employers and employees alike. With the rising costs of healthcare, can business owners afford to offer insurance without eating up profits?
For the most part, the answer is no.
But many employees are not enjoying the benefits of insurance even when they have access to it. In an op-ed piece at
news-leader.com, an Internal Medicine physician makes clear that the health insurance crunch isn't helping anyone: "The link between employment and medical access needs to be severed. If you are poor and get a job that makes you near poor, you will lose your health benefits. This is a disincentive for work. Finally, if you get sick and can't work, you lose the insurance that allows you to pay for your medical care."
And of course, this doesn't even address the financial reality today wherein small business health insurance is too expensive to provide in the first place. Many employers can't afford to cover their employees at all, and those that do are rarely able to extend medical coverage to families.
It's a no-win situation: the ridiculously high costs of healthcare in this country make it difficult to cover employees, and yet also makes it difficult to find affordable individual insurance. The result? No one is happy, and fewer and fewer are healthy.
A potential solution could be medical coverage plans that involve wellness checkups and preventative care. Small businesses are hit hard by absenteeism and lowered productivity, another byproduct of overpriced small business health insurance that doesn't keep people healthy, but only deals with serious illness.
In 2002 the Institute of Medicine reported that, "although as much as 95% of health care spending goes to medical care and biomedical research, lifestyle behavior and the environment are responsible for more that 70% of avoidable mortality."
Facts on:
Small Business Health Insurance
Did you know...
In 2002 the Institute of Medicine reported that, "lifestyle behavior and the environment are responsible for more that 70% of avoidable mortality?"
|
What does this mean? That taking good care of yourself is the key to health, and on a larger scale, could minimize healthcare costs by billions of dollars.
Now, if only employees and individuals could get access to the kind of
medical coverage that could teach them exactly what it
means to take good care of yourself.
Current Topic:
Recent Topics:
