TITLE: Health Insurance Premiums Are Set to Surge in 2024
EXCERPT: After seeing overall inflation rates often in the 7% to 9% range, a 6.5% price increase might not sound so bad. But health insurance plans are extremely expensive: On average, they cost about $14,600 per employee, according to the Journal. The projected increase could add almost $1,000 to that total.
The good news is that — in theory — you won’t have to foot the entire increase yourself. Employers typically split the cost of health insurance with their employees, with a portion of the cost deducted from each paycheck in the form of a premium.
Exactly how much of this overall increase in cost for health plans will come out of your pocket will depend on how your employer plans on dealing with the elevated prices. But if you're trying to read the tea leaves, it may help to know that employer size tends to play a major role in how much a company contributes to a worker’s health plan, according to the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.
In 2022, KFF found that employers generally covered 83% of the cost of annual premiums for singles, leaving 17% to their workers. For family coverage, employers covered less — 72%. However, workers at companies with less than 200 employees typically had to spend more out of pocket. For family plans, as an example, small companies paid 64% of the premium.
TITLE: Employer-Sponsored Healthcare Aggravates US Inequality
EXCERPT: Virtually every US resident with private health benefits receives them through an employer. The federal government heavily subsidizes this arrangement by letting employers write off the costs, reducing federal tax revenue by $300 billion a year—the single-largest federal tax expenditure.
Because the costs of these benefits are not contingent on earnings, the burden is proportionally heavier for workers who make less money. In 2019, the average annual cost of employer-provided health benefits—$12,000—amounted to 25 percent of the income of an average full-time worker without a college degree, compared with 12 percent of the earnings of a full-time worker with a degree.
The researchers quantified the historical effect of this health wedge, as they call it, on employment and earnings. They find that the burden of surging medical costs over the past several decades has contributed roughly as much to inequality in the labor market as far more prominent concerns such as globalization.
TITLE: Best Practices: Doctors Try To Reclaim the Soul of Medicine
EXCERPT: “They call this physician burnout,” he said, pacing in front of the screen as it filled with images of doctors with their heads in their hands or leaning on a crash cart or sliding down against a wall. “But burnout is the wrong term. The right term is moral injury,” he continued, citing a paper by psychiatrist Wendy Dean and surgeon Simon Talbot, which emphasized that it wasn’t the doctors who were broken, but the system. “I like to summarize it as a conscience violation,” Lassey said. “We simultaneously know what someone needs, but are unable to provide it due to constraints beyond our control.”
Medicine used to be simple, Lassey explained. Doctors were embedded in their communities. They knew and were known by their patients, who paid them for their services directly. “But then it went from a relationship between two people to a relationship between three people. And I think we can all agree, when you’re in a committed relationship, and a third person enters that relationship, things get weird.”
What we have now, Lassey said, is money flying over the doctor’s head and into the pockets of payors—namely, insurance companies and government. “Don’t get me wrong,” he clarified. “We all like insurance. We have car insurance. Doesn’t cost us much money, and if we crash our car, they’ll buy us a new one. But we don’t use insurance for every oil change or new set of tires. If we did, the insurance would cost more than the car.”