{"id":2311,"date":"2009-05-22T18:28:06","date_gmt":"2009-05-22T18:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2311"},"modified":"2009-05-22T18:28:06","modified_gmt":"2009-05-22T18:28:06","slug":"why_its_broken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2311","title":{"rendered":"Why It&#8217;s Broken"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Uwe Reinhardt, one of the smartest people writing about health care policy today, has penned a <a href=\"http:\/\/economix.blogs.nytimes.com\/2009\/05\/22\/is-employer-based-health-insurance-worth-saving\/\">great essay about our employer-based health insurance system and its shortcomings<\/a>. After pointing out that our current system is the ugly stepchild of Truman-era politics, he discusses three big flaws in employer-sponsored insurance: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It shields employees from the true cost of health care, which in turn gives them no disincentive to treat their health benefits like an all-you-can-eat buffet.&nbsp; <\/li>\n<li>It isn&#8217;t portable. Lose your job and your health care goes with it.<\/li>\n<li>It doesn&#8217;t treat all employers fairly. A small employer with a sick employee is going to suffer a much more sizable hit to its balance sheet than a Fortune 500 company with the same sick employee. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m beginning to see the merits of taxing employer health benefits as a means to fund health care reform. People who like their insurance can keep it, but it will be treated as part of their total compensation package. And if they don&#8217;t like it or it&#8217;s not available to them, they have other affordable options. Organized labor is not going to like it one bit, but with a little creativity, they can come up with new perks that employers can more easily afford. Child care. Education reimbursement. Pensions! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Uwe Reinhardt, one of the smartest people writing about health care policy today, has penned a great essay about our employer-based health insurance system and its shortcomings. After pointing out that our current system is the ugly stepchild of Truman-era politics, he discusses three big flaws in employer-sponsored insurance: It shields employees from the true <a href='https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2311' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-Bh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}