Health Insurance 44

[tbonebanjo]

I was just wondering how many companies still have good insurance and how many have gone the way of Obamacare. I am in a small MEP firm in Maryland. Our health insurance just changed, our premiums went up and our coverage went way down. I have maximum out of pocket expenses of $12,500 per year, $4000 deductable per person, tnen start the copay schedules. Should I start looking for other employment or are all companies being affected this way?

 

[glass99]

beej: yes, it is an artificial shortage of doctors.

Teddy Roosevelt busted up Standard Oil and the railroads over a century ago with the Sherman Act. Watch out Yale School of Medicine! No more boasting about being selective!

 

[KENAT]

IRstuff, I'd imagine in a field like medicine where you're dealing with the general public, often at times of great stress, potentially life & death situations etc. that aspects such as general culture and language skills could be quite a significant issue to which having some kind of residency may not be a bad approach.

We have engineers & scientists from all around the world here and language skills* & to a lesser extent general cultural norms can be an issue.



* I'm primarily thinking their English skills not always being fantastic but in fairness I'm mediocre at English, terrible at French and it goes down hill from there.

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
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[glass99]

Kenat: in communist France, the man on the street embraces the strong arm of a paternalistic government, and is comfortable with his government using its power to compel doctors to work for low wages. We in the US believe in the principle that consenting adults should be able to deal directly with each other.

 

[JohnRBaker]

"We in the US believe in the principle that consenting adults should be able to deal directly with each other."

Perhaps, but in reality this only works to the extent that our wealth and station in society allows us to...

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Digital Factory
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[CELinOttawa]

And the parties have to be on reasonably even footing... You cannot have fair dealing when the individual basis of power from which they negotiate is worlds apart.

 

[glass99]

One way that the US government is to blame for the current healthcare cost problem is its WWII era decision to make health insurance tax deductible. If we pay 30% tax on income and zero out the tax selectively, we basically pay 30% more for that item. It is a market distortion.
- Why is food any less of a human right than healthcare? Organic kale, whole grains, and humanely raised meat are much better for you than a deep fried hormone laden double down from Micky D's, though it is more expensive. Its arguable that we would have better health outcomes if food was tax deductible and healthcare was taxed. Lets give it to the underpaid farmers rather than the overpaid cardiologist.

 

[beej67]

Some folks in the thread might find this interesting.

http://www.fa-mag.com/news/meet-the...-the-administration-over-obamacare-19861.html

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[cranky108]

Actually food is exempt from sales tax in some states, the same as health care. But than again, items purchased for food production is also sales tax exempt, and if it's a business, it's also a cost of production which is income tax exempt.

 

[glass99]

cranky: yes food is typically sales tax exempt but not income tax exempt.

 

[IRstuff]

There used to be a difference between "unprocessed" vs. "processed" foods w.r.t. taxes, but that no longer seems to be the case in California.

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[SomptingGuy]

Tax on food is temperature-dependent in the UK. And (fittingly) a political hot potato:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty_tax

- Steve

 

[IRstuff]

I remember that, but there grew a plethora of exceptions, both on the hot and cold side. I remember growing up in San Francisco where stores wound up having to keep track of individual items on the grocery shelf, where taxable items were next to tax-exempt items.

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[glass99]

Mayor Mike Bloomberg here in NYC tried to impose a high sales tax on sugary soft drinks. He was unsuccessful because of opposition from a coalition between Coke and the tabloid news outlets. Mayor Mike was criticized as being out of touch with working class ways of life. A $1 soda is a cheap daily pleasure for the 99%.

Soda has an appalling amount of sugar it in, and it more responsible for more expensive health problems (especially diabetes) than practically anything other than cigarettes and alcohol.

-> Soda should be taxed like cigarettes
-> Kale should be income tax deductible

 

[cranky108]

So now health has transformed into the food police. And did we not see it coming?

The problem is who decides what is good, and bad for us, and how much is too much. And how long ago were tomatoes thought a health problem? And what about those foods that are taboo in some places and not others? Any one try horse, pork, cow, deer, bear, carp, corn, beer, wine, dandelion, dog, cat, road kill? Where does it stop? (Not that I choose to consume all of these).

At some point a government who limits what we consume for health reasons, will over reach. Which is why we should not go down that route in the first place.

And at some point we should look at health at a multipoint level. There is what we need to live for after an accident. What we need to live for after we have over consumed. And what we want because we want to look better. And what we need because our body is failing us.

 

[IRstuff]

"Which is why we should not go down that route in the first place."

That's fine, but why are the rest of us forced to pay increased insurance premiums to cover all the health problems caused by the consumption of all these things? Juvenile diabetes rate is going through the roof, so we're all paying for the insulin now, and all the complications of their diabetes later. By ignoring the root cause, we guarantee the worst possible economic and health outcome. For a society that came up with pithy sayings like, "A stitch in time saves nine," and, "Penny wise, pound foolish," we seem hellbent on going the exact opposite direction.

It's all very fine and dandy to protest government intrusion into our lives, but is the willful negligence by others resulting in the sucking up of health care resources somehow better? If they want to do all these things in the name of freedom from government nannyism, that's fine, but they should pay for that privilege. You want to smoke and fill your body with carcinogens, fine, then every pack of cigarettes should include your share of your eventual burden on the health care system. To do otherwise is to simply toe some inane dogmatic line, bury your head in the sand, and open up your wallet and leave on the sidewalk.

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[cranky108]

In some insurance policies, they do charge more for smokers, and I would trust an insurance company more than the government, because I can change insurance companies or policies, or even have a health saving account.
And in fact if I get a yearly blood test I get points into a health spending account, and even more points if I meet some targets. So I am infact penalized for not being healthy. And I have no government restrictions on what I eat.

In reality, peanut butter is a known chocking hazard, so why not outlaw peanut butter?

I am in favor of government restrictions like "no spitting on the side walk", or a waiting period if you have been eboli areas.

But why the double standard, don't eat this, but if you have a eboli you can go into public places.

 

[glass99]

cranky: We need to get a point where the costs imposed on others of personal choices are paid for by the individuals making those choices. If you are a libertarian you should believe that.

In principle I am somewhat of a libertarian too and agree that tax is a perversion, but a soda tax to me is a no brainer. Its kind of is like the "no spitting on the sidewalk" rule in the sense that you are asking people to not make a mess for others to clean up.

America has a cultural problem with soda. There are many people in this country who don't like drinking water, and consider it normal to hydrate with soda. If we lived in a parallel universe where a person's sickness affected only themselves, that's one thing, but it doesn't work like that. If you let your boss down by not showing up for work because you just had a stroke caused by having chugged 6 cans of Dr Pepper a day, that's a cost.

Soda is a luxury!

 

[IRstuff]

The problem with insurance companies is:
> I don't trust them that much more than the government, possibly less, because their motivations are strictly monetary
> that sort of adder is based on self-reporting, for the most part. If the true cost of smoking were reflected in the premiums, smokers would LIE about it, and they would only get caught after they wind up diagnosed with a smoking-related disease.

Tying the consequence cost to the actual product eliminates all that lying, aside from the inevitable workarounds that resulted from the temperance laws we attempted at the front end of the last century.

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[glass99]

IRStuff: People should not drink alcohol either. Its actually irrational to do so in many ways. If it were strictly an occasional luxury it would be rational to consume, but there are large swathes of the population who are addicted to alcohol and whose health and productivity suffers disproportionately.

Its going to be hard to ban alcohol, but we have the more current issue of marijuana. Are we going to see an uptick in lung cancer in 10 years because of the current legalization effort?

 

[rconnor]

Not likely