Health Insurance from Employers
According to the article “Who Gets Employer-Based Health Insurance” by Catherine Rampell in the NYTimes Economix, an important issue of the health insurance debate going on in Washington DC is what to do with employer-based health insurance. Only in the US does losing your job translate to possibly losing your health insurance coverage. That’s why individual health insurance is sometimes a better option. That’s also one of the reasons why the government is looking towards a new health plan.
In the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation report on health benefits, not all American companies offer health insurance to its employees. Often times, very small companies cannot afford to offer this benefit. Of the companies that do offer the benefit, they only pay for a portion of the cost, while the rest is taken out of the employee’s paycheck each pay period. A few do offer to cover the whole cost, but not many.
Many Americans are very comfortable with the employer-based health insurance option and worry about it going away. This has lead Congress to consider not eliminating it altogether.