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The current U.S. system of voluntary employment-based health benefits is not the consequence of an overarching and deliberate plan or policy. Rather, it reflects a gradual accumulation of factors: innovations in health care finance and organization, conflicting political and social principles, coincidences of timing, market dynamics, programs stimulated by the findings of health services research, and spillover effects of tax and other policies aimed at different targets.
The explanations are long, but I hope people will read these urls.
The most familiar aspect of employment-based insurance’s past is its rapid growth in the first three decades after World War II, the relative stability that followed for about a decade, and the decline in coverage since the late 1980s. The exemption of employer payments for health insurance from employees’ taxable income, combined with substantial efficiency advantages of group over individual insurance, fueled rapid expansion. By the mid-1950s, 45 percent of the population had hospital insurance; coverage soared to 77 percent by 1963.1 Also, by 1963 more than half of the population had coverage for regular medical expenses, and almost one-fourth had major medical insurance.2
Employment-based coverage reached its peak sometime in the 1980s and has been declining since then. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), coverage of workers ages 18–64 fell 2.8 percentage points between 1987 and 1999.3 Another EBRI series shows a decline of 3.5 percentage points from 1999 to 2004.4 Linking the two series indicates a decline of 6.3 percentage points from 1987 to 2004. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, derived from establishment surveys, show a decline for full-time workers in the private sector of fifteen percentage points from 1989–90 to 2003.5 Regardless of data source, it appears that the best days of employment-based insurance are in the past.
Employers offered health insurance as an incentive to attract talent and/or as a means to keep workers more productive.
At some point, people got the wrong impression that it was the duty of an employer.
05-07-2017, 12:44 PM
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n/a posts
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Originally Posted by pknopp
No we don't have to simply "accept" (no, this wasn't your word) the marginally better. We should have demanded better. We should throw out those who do not pursue better. We have to throw out those who lie to us.
Okay, you go refuse to accept anything that isn't exactly what you want. Let us know how that works out for you, considering half the country will oppose anything you suggest, even if they actually support it. And even if some of them did come around and stop voting out of spite, it still wouldn't matter because we don't have anything close to a representative congress.
Your rigid idealism will get you nothing. It'll make you worse off.
I don't like the system either, but given that it's what we have to work with, any halfway rational, reasonable person realizes that the only way we get any progress is incrementally.
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As an aside......right now we have no clue what the GOP plan will be in the end
Wal Greens offered it at least since 2004, when a relative began there, and management makes sure the vast majority of employees who want coverage , get 30 hours per week. Their daytime shifts staff always gets 30.
ACA did not affect their POV.
Wal Mart, as of 2008, insured 50%, 10% above industry %.
So your solution is to take away the healthcare people have gotten from it? We'd have single payer right now if it weren't for the GOP. ACA was a compromise.
They had 60 votes and Obama said as Candidate Obama that he's not going to do single payer. Granted, he lied about everything else.
The representative's comment is a blatant lie and insulting to anyone who has to hear it.
I used to wonder how people who make such stupid statements can be elected to office... Then I come here and see the comments made by their constituents and it all makes sense. It's sad.
Okay, you go refuse to accept anything that isn't exactly what you want. Let us know how that works out for you, considering half the country will oppose anything you suggest, even if they actually support it. And even if some of them did come around and stop voting out of spite, it still wouldn't matter because we don't have anything close to a representative congress.
Because many have no principles does not mean all have to give them up. Actually it worked for me better than many. Trump or Hillary, it was all the same to me. You?
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Your rigid idealism will get you nothing. It'll make you worse off.
I have insurance.
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I don't like the system either, but given that it's what we have to work with, any halfway rational, reasonable person realizes that the only way we get any progress is incrementally.
We do know what they voted on...
We know what the House voted on. Selling out to Wall Street is not progress.
During World War II, the federal government was wary of post-war inflation. The administration saw the terrible devastation hyperinflation wreaked on post-World War I Germany and they were determined to hold it at bay through wage and price controls which they instituted during the war. In reaction to the wage controls, many labor groups planned to go on strike en masse. In order to avert the strike, in a concession to the labor groups, the War Labor Board exempted employer-paid health benefits from wage controls and income tax.
This historical accident created a tax advantage that drove enormous demand for employer-provided health insurance plans over the previously more common individual health insurance. Employers received a 100% tax deduction while the benefits employees received were exempt from federal, state, and city taxation.
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The Result
As early as the 1940s, when the U.S. presidential administration tried to end the tax break and reform healthcare, the employer-provided health industry was already dug-in. In addition, labor groups preferred the employer-provided health insurance model. By the mid-1960s, employer-provided health insurance was almost universal.
Links are not available. It was published same time WM 50% was, at a time SEIU was pushing to raise it.
Even if we accepted it, the reality is that only about half of the 40% of people have enough hrs to get it. And being able to point at a small % of minimum wage folks who get it, while ignoring the large number who don't is just ignoring reality.
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