You _are_ joking, right? Health insurance costs are driven by the cost of medical care. Part of care providers (hospitals, physicians) cost is the cost of malpractice insurance. The money to pay those malpractice premiums comes directly from patients or indirectly from patients and/or their employers via health insurance premiums.
I suggest you read some authoritative sources on this subject. I said insurance premiums. No direct correlation exists between law suits and premiums. Doctors are getting screwed. Check out the states where awards are capped and see if premiums are appreciably less. Thumper
I have done the costing on plans like these. The objective is to attract and retain healthy weight (and non-smokers) employees and encourage less healthy employees to seek employement elsewhere, where they are not penalized for their weight or smoking habits. For a company like Safeway, health insurance costs is over 30% of the total employee cost *on average*. For large groups of employees it is over
50% (I am talking about employee classes like cashiers, stocking clerks, not health status).No one has ever shown much of an impact where employees actually improve their behavior as a result of these plans.
Keep in mind that Safeway used to have something like 100% annual employee turnover. So attracting the "right" type of employee is a very effective way of keeping your health care costs down. It is probably lower now because the employment situation is so bad, but I am sure they are turning over 100% in 2 or 2.5 years even now.
Effectively they are offering fifty cents an hour more to low BMI non smokers. In the $7.50 to $10.00 an hour area that is not a negligible amount.
I have just done costing on a plan where the median employee is going to be paying 18% of their gross in the cost share. Knocking that down to 10% might seem like a big inducement, but most people will not lose weight or quit smoking for that. Heck smokers have not been discouraged by the huge increases in the prices of cigarettes. Social pressure has done a lot more to reduce smoking. But low wage employees smoke at a much higher rate than the general population, so smoking is still a big issue for health care costs in this population.
I agree.
Personal experience tells me that the time you get attention is if you go to an emergency in a hospital (not guranteed of course and depends on the place).
I have experience paying cash (check actually) for someone who didn't have coverage. Service was not a problem. But, again it was in the context of a emergency.
Getting a doctor to take you on as a patient has been difficult throughout my experience (and that's not even based on my health status). Why? I don't know.
-Antony
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