How the High Cost of Health Care is Hurting Businesses, and Should the Rich be Taxed for Health Care Costs?
Welcome to this installment of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. This week we will look at two different articles, one talking business, one talking politics, but both showing interesting angles on how the high prices of health care are affecting varying sectors of our economy and our lives. The first article comes from the small business section of the Wall Street Journal and is entitled, "Sick and Getting Sicker."
This article talks about how small business are coping with the high costs of health care…if they're able to at all. In some cases, according to the article, health care costs are the highest expense after salaries for many companies, which stunts their growth and prevents them from pursuing business opportunities or hiring ideal candidates at competitive wages. The article discusses how, in times of economic turmoil such as these, small businesses help with recovery. However, with so many struggling just to afford health care, this might show a slower recovery than we originally might have thoughts.
The article discusses a bit about what Congress is doing, but it also shows the anecdote of what one company is doing to survive. The company, Nimbus Software of Atlanta, has had to do things like outsource work overseas rather than hire local workers so it can afford to keep its current employees insured. The small size of the company also means it's at the mercy of insurance companies for their pricing, rather than self-insuring like the large companies can do.
Overall, this article paints a fairly bleak picture for the outlook on the current and future situations of small businesses. One can only hope that health insurance companies and our government can work together to bring about change soon enough for small businesses and individuals to feel some relief from high health care prices.
Our next article is somewhat related to that last point. The article, entitled, "Rangel Proposes Surtax on Wealthy for Health Care," comes to us from WebCPA. In this article, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, the democratic senator from New York, has proposed to tax the wealthy in order to pay for health care. According to his proposal, individuals who earn over $280,000, $400,000 and $800,000 per year, and couples who make over $350,000, $500,000 and $1 million per year would be surtaxed between one and three percent of their incomes.
This is a controversial proposal, and many people are against it. It seems as if its punishing people who make a certain amount of money, according to some, while others think there are more effective and efficient ways besides new taxes. Whichever way the government decides to raise money to pay for health care reform, hopefully it won't be on anyone's back, even if they're wealthy.
This concludes this installment of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. As always, I hope you have found it enjoyable and entertaining.
