- Stop the never ending open enrollment that enables people to buy health insurance for one month, have pre-existing conditions covered in full and drop health insurance the next month.
- Increase the penalty on employers and employees for not having health insurance.
- Add an asset test to CommonwealthCare like we do for nursing home payments through Medicaid.
- Audit CommonwealthCare to ensure subscribers are not eligible for employer sponsored group insurance.
- Allow employers to offer health insurance without prescription coverage and still meet MCC (minimum credible coverage) standards.
- Consider offering a plan that does not have all the costly state mandates as many large employers are able to do through their self-insured plan.
The last one may be impossible to do, but the first five can easily be done and help contain the health insurance premiums for small companies.
6 comments:
Bill I heard today that employers who have over 7 employees, must have a certain percent of those employees take their health insurance (which of course the employer must pay a portion of), or they get fined. Have you heard of this? That is ludicrous.
It is 11 or more full-time employees or the equivalents and has been in force since the advent of Masss Healtcare Reform.
Lets just say you had 7 or 8 employees and did not offer health insurance. Would you hire a few more to get to the threshold and be subject to the penalty?
"INCREASE THE PENALTY ON EMPLOYERS ............FOR NOT HAVING HEALTH INSURANCE"
<<<<< SCRATCHING HEAD
<<<<< PERPLEXED LOOK
<<<<< PUZZLED
<<<<< CONFUSED
<<<<< BAFFLED
SOOOOOOOOOO..........HEALTH INS. S/B THE EMPLOYER'S PROBLEM
SURELY YOU JEST??
IT'S LATE....MAYBE ILL RE-READ IT THIS MORNING AFTER A GOOD NIGHTS SLEEP. I MUSTA MISSED SOMETHING OR MISREAD IT
employer-sponsored health insurance became paopular during worl war 2 when there were wage and price controls. Group Plans were marketed to employers, then HMOs came in under NIxon in the 1970s. As part of ROmneycare, the employer mandate was created to avoid "crowd-out": employers dropping their plans to push employees into the publicly subsidized pool. There are also penalties if your employees use the free care pool instead of getting insurance from you
T Traveler, so I guess we kinda could say that if teh gov't did not impose price controls during WWII then employer based health insure may never have come into existence......possibly..???
See the problems the gov't creates when it tries to control prices.
If not for this WWII govt intervention in the marketplace, maybe we'd have a much more consumer driven HC industry, so I'd be able to shop around my colostomy.
Bill, any reaction to Lisa Carroll's plan in the Telegram? could this help small business?
http://www.telegram.com/article/20100316/NEWS/3160358/1054/opinion
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