Commentaries
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September 25, 2009
Americans increasingly fear that health reform is something Congress is planning to do to them, not for them. Nowhere is this truer than with Washington's plan to require every American to have health insurance or face a hefty new tax. Liberals believe the federal requirement is necessary to achieve universal coverage. This is a worthy goal, but it sets up a cascade of big-government spending and intrusions that the American people are saying, as clearly as they can, they do not want.
September 16, 2009
“The Body Count at Home,” by Nicholas D. Kristof (column, Sept. 13), provides further evidence that we need to reform the way people get health insurance in the United States. Nikki White, who died of lupus at 32, clearly needed health insurance, but that doesn’t mean we need the government-controlled health system that Mr. Kristof seems to admire. Tying health insurance to the workplace isn’t working for tens of millions of people in our highly mobile work force, and it tragically failed Ms. White. She could have received the care that she needed if she had insurance that was stable and portable and that was not dependent upon her job.
September 3, 2009
The fight over the "public option" has obscured debate on an element of congressional health reform plans that would be equally consequential and equally threatening to many Americans: the "pay-or-play" mandate. Rather than changing one of the worst features of American health care - the fact that insurance is almost always tied to employment - it would carve that fact in stone. If that weren't bad enough, it would threaten to drag down wages and kill jobs in the process by driving up costs for employers.
May 18, 2009
The United States is unique in the developed world in that the majority of Americans have private health insurance that they receive through the workplace. This is not the result of a deliberate decision but rather policy that evolved as the unintended consequence of a World War II ruling. Factory owners were competing to lure and keep good workers and wanted to offer health insurance as a benefit, but they needed the government’s assurance that this wouldn’t violate wartime wage and price controls.
May 11, 2009
President Obama says that today’s commitment by six health-sector groups to help contain health costs shows he is on track to achieve his (highly elusive) goal of saving “the average American family $2,500.” The group’s pledge to reduce the growth in health spending by 1.5% is interesting because it puts the focus more on costs than on achieving universal access to health insurance.
May 11, 2009
The United States is unique in the developed world in that the majority of Americans have private health insurance that they receive through the workplace. This is not the result of a deliberate decision but rather policy that evolved as the unintended consequence of a World War II ruling. Factory owners were competing to lure and keep good workers and wanted to offer health insurance as a benefit, but they needed the government’s assurance that this wouldn’t violate wartime wage and price controls.
March 27, 2009
Health benefits are a part of employees’ compensation packages, with the average job-based policy for a family now costing about $13,000 a year. This is likely the most lavish expenditure that most employees make, and most don’t even know it. Tax policy hides from them how much of their pay package is going to health insurance. Capping this tax break would be good policy, despite the barrage of ads the American people heard during the 2008 campaign.
November 17, 2008
People purchasing health insurance in the individual market face double-jeopardy: Unless they are eligible for the self-employment tax deduction, they must pay for coverage with after-tax dollars, and they also face the full plethora of state insurance mandates and regulations. Despite these encumbrances, the individual market functions much better than conventional wisdom assumes. Lifting burdens on the individual market – rather than adding new ones – could enable it to become an important base for expanded health coverage.
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