The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018
10/4/2011
Dear Editor,
On Sunday, you reported that a study done by Aon Hewitt revealed that companies will push more health care costs onto their workers by nearly 11% next year. This is ironic because this increase can be attributed to the tough state of the economy. The state of the economy causes more young adults to be unemployed, yet if we had more employed and healthy young adults companies’ medical expenditures wouldn’t be so costly. As a college student who will shortly be entering the workforce, my perspective is that large companies should be incentivized to hire young adults to balance out the medical expenditures for older employees. What people don’t realize is that our nation as a whole could decrease our health care expenditures in the long run if we’d adopt a defensive attitude towards our health. I think preventative care and health incentivizing could really make a difference; whether it is on a national level, or a more specific level, like the workplace, which this article addresses.
Sincerely,
Riley Sisk
2710 Channing Way, Berkeley CA 94704
(831) 334-7693
To view the actual article:
http://prescriptions.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/new-survey-projects-higher-employee-health-premiums/
The push of health care costs onto employees is an unfortunate result of the economic times. With wages either decreasing or remaining stagnant, it is tragic that the working class should have to shoulder more of the financial burden of health care. One option that I feel has not been thoroughly explored is perhaps pooling employers so that they can use their workforce as leveraging power against insurance company. If a large network of smaller companies were able to join into a health care coalition, they could use their large employee base to demand a lower price range for their workers. Similarly to the same way that European Nations are able to price negotiate for their citizens, perhaps many companies working together could do the same in a free market manner. Just a thought.
ReplyDelete-Bryan F Marks