Right now, the majority of Americans that have health insurance coverage are able to afford it because their employer offers it to them as a job benefit. While this situation has some advantages, it also comes with many problems.
For decades, the easiest way for Americans to find affordable health insurance coverage was to look for a company or business that offered an employer sponsored health insurance plan to its workers. Those that got hired, full time, by one of these companies were all set.
The worker was assured that the company would continue to offer good health insurance coverage, (perhaps even after the employee became retired). The company knew that the worker was going to be loyal, and work for them until he reached retirement. This was true when my parents were young adults who were starting a family in the early 1970’s.
Today, things have changed. It has become more and more difficult to find employers that offer health insurance plans to their workers. The ones that still offer it have taken measures to limit it in many ways.
Part time employees typically are excluded from qualifying for the employer sponsored health plan. Some full time workers may not qualify either, depending on how long they have worked for the company, or exactly how many hours (on average) they work in a given month. Companies are terminating their health insurance plans for retired workers. Americans can no longer count on their employer helping them to afford health care coverage. Despite the facts, that belief still persists.
The United States recently went through a recession. Thousands of people lost their jobs. It became apparent that there is a huge problem with employer sponsored health insurance. If a person loses her job, she also loses her health insurance coverage. Her spouse and children also lose that health insurance coverage.
Another big problem with employer sponsored health insurance can be explained by pointing at the current controversy over the coverage of birth control in the health plans that employers offer to their workers. If you remove the political and religious aspects of the argument you can easily see the underlying problem. Employers who offer health plans to workers want to have control over what, exactly, those plans cover.
Health insurance is expensive. Employers want to save as much money as possible, in order to make the maximum amount of profit. Cutting back on what the employee health insurance plan covers is one way to do that.
This brings up another problem with employer sponsored health insurance. Workers who feel that the health plan they can get from their job is insufficient for their needs are pretty much stuck. The American health insurance system has been based around employer sponsored health insurance for so long that there aren’t many affordable alternatives to it. Perhaps it is time to change this broken system.
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