This blog contains posts and comments written by students in Dr. Tufte's economics classes at Southern Utah University.
11/30/2005
Decreasing Health Benefits In Corporate America
One of the best things about working for a big company is that not only do you usually get a better salary, but you also get to look forward to the contribution from the company towards your health insurance. But in recent years a trend of decreasing company contributions is beginning to be noticeable. As everything from corporate downsizing to other cost savings, corporations are finding more and more ways to cut what they are paying out to employees. It seems to me the more I read about corporate america today is that the shareholders are more important to the company than even the employees. While the employees struggle to live, the top CEO and shareholders are raking in the money. Now they have the nerve to take even more by cutting health insurance contributions. If you ask me this is just wrong and very unethical. It has always been a belief of mine that you shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you and this is definitely biting that hand. Its the employees that should be valued the most since their the ones making the money. Health Insurance
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3 comments:
-1 on Liz's post for punctuation and grammatical errors.
Umm ... Liz ... kind of a socialist viewpoint, don't you think?
The last time I checked, the shareholders were the only stakeholder that a firm is strictly obligated to.
As to health benefits, yes they have been cut. But, they have been cut in an environment of generally rising compensation. What is going on is that health insurance rates are going up faster than worker productivity - so firms do not have a cushion large enough to cover it all.
Blake: why do we expect employers to pay for our health insurance but not our car insurance? I'm not sure the rest of this matters if we can't explain simple propositions like this. Think about it.
As corporate healthcare benefits have continued to soar, IndUShealth has created a global healthcare solution that can generate immediate hard-dollar savings, and is also easy to implement. Because the first question is typically, “how much can I save?” IndUShealth has created a Global Healthcare Option Calculator that allows corporate benefit managers to obtain estimates of potential savings. See www.indushealth.com/corpsavcalc.htm
Offering a Global Healthcare Option to subscribers has also been demonstrated to lower the annual cost increases faced by employers located in certain communities, especially those with fewer competitive local offerings. IndUShealth programs have also begun to result in a reduction in stop-loss insurance claims, thereby reducing premium increases associated with their annual policy renewal. It is estimated that within two to three years of launching their IndUShealth Global Healthcare Option programs, these two forms of additional savings related to access to care in their local communities rival in magnitude to the hard-dollar savings achieved by those plan participants who elect to travel overseas for care.
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