Healthcare systems and policy overview

Health Insurance

Last year the State of Massachusetts made health insurance a mandatory requirement for all citizens above 18 years of age. The health bill is touted to be a successful outcome after more than 2 years of lobbying and politicking. It is based on a collective responsibility where health insurance costs are shared between the people, businesses and the government. Making health insurance a legal necessity, the Bill requires all citizens of Massachusetts possess some form of health insurance before July 1st 2007 and that all employers with more than 10 employees contribute towards employee insurance or be penalized at the rate of $295 per employee every year. (Pam Belluck). The Gov Mitt Romney told in an interview, "We insist that everybody who drives a car has insurance. And cars are a lot less expensive than people" (David a. Fahrenthold). It is definitely a prudent and wise measure to insist on employers to offer health insurance coverage of their employees.

With a huge number of uninsured people, hospitals across the nation are struggling to cope up with the financial burden. The costs accrued by hospitals due to treating of uninsured people are usually shifted to insured people resulting in the insurance company having to pay for larger bills. This in turn has had the effect of increasing the insurance premium by around 10% per annum per individual. As a paper from the New American Foundation states, "When medical bills go unpaid, many health care providers shift the costs onto those who can pay -- those with health insurance. This cost-shifting amounts to a hidden tax levied by providers on behalf of those who cannot pay, the uninsured and underinsured." In the state of California, for example, it is found that the hidden tax amounts to $455 per person annually and around $1,186 per family per year. [Author not available] Employees are the assets of an organization. Making employee insurance compulsory would bring more people under insurance coverage and also indirectly help in controlling the ever-increasing premium costs.

2) Surviving and succeeding in the globalized environment is all about maximizing efficiency and improving the productivity, while at the same time being a cost effective and competent organization. Employee insurance costs may at the outset look as an unimportant and dispensable expenditure, but in reality it is far from true. Research has shown that health insurance can increase overall productivity by reducing the costs associated with "Employee Absenteeism," reducing the costs of turnover, and thereby contributing to optimising the output. (Ellen O'Brien). Most people lacking insurance are from the lower economic layer of the society and more than two thirds of this group are full time workers. The lack of insurance coverage implies that these poor people are putting off their medical attention until an emergency situation arises. In majority of the cases such medical emergencies could have been averted with timely medical intervention. "Many people simply put off medical care until they end up in the ER - much sicker and requiring more care than they would have had they been visiting a doctor on a regular basis." [Dr.Barry Simon] the result is a very high cost of absence from work that affects national productivity to the tune of $409 billion. [State of California] Also, providing insurance coverage to employees promotes a sense of security and a feeling of belonging to an organization that not just pays for services rendered, but also cares about the individual and the family.