As addenda to my post on George Bush's health care shell game at Tapped, this Kaiser Daily Report is fairly relevant:
The number of U.S. employers that offer health benefits at no cost to employees decreased from 1998 to 2003, according to a study by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Bloomberg/Houston Chronicle reports. In a report released Wednesday, AHRQ found that in 1998, 35% of U.S. citizens said their employer provided them with free health care. That proportion dropped to 28% in 2003, according to Beth Levin Crimmel, a statistician at the agency who led the study. Steven Cohen, director of AHRQ's Center for Financing Access and Cost Trends, said that the findings show that many companies are attempting to control rising health care costs by requiring employees to contribute to their own health plans (Bloomberg/Houston Chronicle, 1/11).
The tension, now, is between businesses that want to shunt more costs onto employees and employees who want them stopped. Bush, while claiming to respond to employee concerns, is actually empowering business. Shocking, I know.
The secondary issue here is economic incidence, or who actually pays for employee's health care (i.e, does business just pass it onto the consumer through higher prices, the employee through fewer wage increases, or themselves through smaller profits and/or executive perks). Kate, InsureBlog's Henry Stern, and some others had an interesting argument on this that I suggest you check out. I'm fairly unsympathetic to claims that the economic incidence need go straight to the consumer. That may be what the business decides to do, but considering the embarrassing state of executive compensation in this country, if businesses wanted/needed, they could certainly be tightening belts at the top. That the belts have remained slack says a lot about the disparity between corporate realities and the woe-is-them picture painted whenever benefit issues arise.