The Health Benefits That Cut Your Pay

Health care, associated expenses, and our outcomes are at the very top of our national agenda. The enclosed link overviews a commentary on these issues. OOA leadership have read the New York Times commentary and have been weighing in as to their thoughts.

Accordingly, we are posting an example that you may find of value and interest.

Dr. Melvin Shipp, Dean, OSU College of Optometry:

• We do pay a lot for health care, but there no evidence that employers would give a substantial portion to employees in wages via this scenario.
• Also there is little evidence employers would create more jobs; business is currently sitting on over $2 trillion in reserves and is not creating jobs.  In some cases businesses are cutting health benefits to employees.
• The catastrophic costs idea has been around for some time. The problem is it ignores the concept of primary care’s role in reducing costs.
• If you only cover catastrophic care, people will not get adequate primary care and will get sicker, faster and at a higher cost.
• If we keep the employer based system, we would simply shift the costs to the individual or Medicare with a catastrophic only plan. We would still have to pay for it but much more inefficiently.
• By the way, as you know that is how it used to be with hospital only plans.