Commentary By Ron Beasley
The Wall Street Journal headline reads: McDonald's May Drop Health Plan. Of course it turns out not to be true but even if it was - so what? Let's look at what the McDonald's employees might lose.
This is not health insurance it's a scam. The Basic and Medium plans are no better than no insurance at all. As you may recall my short ride in an ambulance and 13 hours in the hospital cost over $5,000.
As the Journal story makes clear, the policies in question are so-called mini-med plans with very limited benefits. In the case of McDonald's, according to the Journal, there are two options: Employees who go with the minimum plan pay $14 a week for a policy that won't cover more than $2,000 in medical bills a year. Employees who opt for the "generous" option pay about $32 a week for a policy that maxes out at $10,000.
To call that "insurance" is to distort the definition, since these policies would do very little to help people with even moderately serious medical conditions. (You can blow through $10,000 in medical care with one emergency room visit.) And those are the people whom insurance is supposed to help, since they are the ones who face serious financial hardship or have serious trouble getting access to care. As Aaron Caroll, who now blogs at the Incidental Economist, wrote several months ago when the issue first came up, "There are a host of health insurance plans out there that are cheap. It�s just that the majority of those also are crappy. Sure, they�re great if you�re healthy. They only stink when you get sick; but that�s when you need them."
Update
James Joyner gets it right.At the end of the day, our business financed system just doesn�t make
sense, for a whole variety of reasons. We�d be better off with some
sort of baseline single payer system with the ability for those who can
afford it to supplement their coverage.
Cross posted at The Moderate Voice
I noticed the WSJ article and Fox blaring this morning just before I went to sleep. My first reaction was to not believe the WSJ and, obviously, Fox.
ReplyDeleteMy second reaction was to laugh at my own piddly job for not offering insurance when McD's does.
To wake up and read this made me feel better about the whole dang situation.
Of course, I'm still laughing...
You are so right. That's not insurance but a shameful scam, a notch above payday loan sharks and pawnbrokers. Anything leading to the end of such schemes is a step in the right direction. PPACA caught these crooks red-handed with the requirement that 85% of premiums be used for health care. Another rip-off bites the dust.
ReplyDeleteUncoupling employment and health insurance is long overdue. I would like to see a wholesale abandonment of group insurance, which is nothing more than a collection of discriminatory risk pools excluding individuals and families without employment, those most in need of a health care safety net. In the event of layoff or disability what is the logic of anyone's losing health insurance along with the main source of income? Health insurance should be portable and affordable. And yes, it should also actually be insurance.