Employment based health insurance
June 1, 2008 – 10:41 pm by BHI don’t normally post about health insurance, but here goes, from The Healthcare Economist.*
[…] employers likely care more about maintaining healthy people’s health. This way they won’t miss work and the firm can recoup the training costs they invested in the employee. On the other hand, if an employee is stricken with a long-term, debilitating disease, the employer would prefer to get rid of the employee and not cover his medical costs whereas for the individual, the case of a drawn out, expensive, debilitating illness is exactly the reason they want insurance.
Thus, while there are many compelling reasons why insurance should be employment based (e.g., risk pooling, economies of scale, more choice than a single payer system), believing that employer’s can design a superior health insurance benefit schedule is not one of them.
There are very few reasone insurance should be employment based, and I’m not even sure risk pooling is one of them.
*yes, there is only one healthcare economist.
