There must be an instinctive reflex at The Capital Times forcing them to put a negative spin on everything. How else do you explain their headline and then the first line of the story?
Insurance costs show little sign of slowing: WASHINGTON - The growth rate of health insurance premiums failed to reach double digits this year, the first time that's happened since 2000.Madison based In Business Magazine covers the story slightly differently.
Dane County Area Business Report: The drive to greater consumerism in healthcare is yielding bottom-line results, according to a new annual study by the Madison-based insurance solutions firm Mortenson, Matzelle, and Meldrum. M3 compiled information from 500 health plans offered by its clients and found that health insurance premium rate increases fell below double digits nationwide and in Wisconsin in 2005 for the first time in five years.Healthcare FINANCING is still a huge mess in America and it will continue to be a damper on the economy as long as the burden falls on private business as this quote from the Capital Times story illustrates.
The survey shows that medium and larger firms haven't dropped health coverage for employees. Indeed, they're paying more than ever to provide that benefit. Premiums for a family of four now average $10,880 - or about the same amount as the yearly earnings for a minimum wage worker.Removing this burden on employers will mean either shifting costs back to individual consumers or shifting costs back to taxpayers, which is of course the same thing. I believe consumerism is the correct direction if for no other reason than competition always increases value by forcing inefficiencies out of the provider side.
What will absolutely not help is forcing additional costs on employers with compassionate idealistic proposals such as Progressive Dane’s activist support of Mandatory Sick Day Pay for all employees. Again from In Business Magazine:
If the smoking ban weren’t enough, a group called the Healthy Families, Healthy City Campaign would like to place another burden on the Madison business community – mandatory sick leave. … Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin and U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold support a bill that would establish a national minimum of seven days of paid sick leave per year.Details on the local Sick Leave Plan are outlined in an earlier post here. If Progressive Dane gets Mandatory Sick Leave passed, it would not surprise me if Madison small businesses convert their employees to 1099 status. Paying your own Health Insurance and your own Social Security Taxes would certainly be an educational lesson for the college crowd.
