Question 1
A. How has provision of employment based health insurance impacted health policy and social protection of disadvantaged Americans?
Being one of the largest and most diverse societies in the world, spending the most money per capita on healthcare, and having cutting edge medical systems, the US do not provide medical coverage for all its citizens automatically and, furthermore, is far not the healthiest society on the planet. Health insurance overwhelmingly remains rather a perk for most citizens often dependent on their job, or it comes as a result of a government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Our overreliance on an employment based health insurance system led to the fact that individuals who are disadvantaged in the labor market are also disadvantaged in terms of health insurance coverage. As a result, only 70 % of disadvantaged middle-class families have every household member covered by private or government health insurance, well below the middle-class average of 77 % (Staman and Liu, 2009).
Consequently, adults for this most vulnerable group who are unemployed or in jobs that do not offer health insurance have few options other than charity or the emergency room for serious illness. These options are unlikely to be the most effective solutions in dealing with the health problems of uninsured disadvantaged people (Angel, Angel, and Lein, 2003).
B. Should American reliance on employers to provide health benefits be maintained or ended? (2 examples)
It is important to have a glimpse on employment based health insurance from two sides – representatives of disadvantaged people and employers. From the employees’ perspective, a major drawback of such system is its temporariness. Once a person loses its job, he or she automatically loses its health insurance. Employers view this system as an additional cost to their business that makes it uncompetitive in the global marketplace. Therefore, they argue that this cost should be recovered through the prices of the goods oor services they sell. For small employers, it can mean that if serious illness befalls one or several employees in the group, it can drastically and unpredictably drive up the premium for every employee in the group (Reinhardt, 2009). Statistics prove this fact. Only 49 percent of employers with three to nine employees sponsored health insurance for their employees in 2008, as did only 62 percent of employers with three to 199 workers.
It is also noticeable that employment-based health insurance is encouraged by the Congress as a tax-deductible business expense. However, those who purchase health insurance on their own buy it with after-tax dollars.
According to most recent surveys, employed Americans and their families overwhelmingly welcome employment-based health insurance (Reinhardt, 2009). Therefore, Americans are so attached to that system and politicians intend to shore it up.
However, employment-based health insurance should not be abolished completely. Instead, it is important to develop a robust alternative, fully portable insurance that individuals or families can purchase on their own, in a properly regulated and organized market, with public subsidies where deemed necessary.
Question 2
A. What are some of the different approaches (give …