False Promise of Employer Health Coverage
Channel: Truthseekers - Health Justice Podcast
Date: 19/05/2023

An examination of employer health coverage  that incentivizes private health insurance to milk increased profits at the expense of reduced health care benefits, increased risk and out-of-pocket costs to employees, while out-stripping wage growth. Private employer health costs have risen at twice the rate of wage increases. Private health insurers are motivated to shrink their networks of providers (doctors and hospitals), as well as reducing drug formularies to increase profits. Fragmented U.S. commercial health insurance balloons administrative costs. Kaiser Family Foundation reported that employer-provided health coverage declined from 67.7 percent in 2000 to 57 percent by 2017.

Senator Bernie Sanders and business CEO Richard Master advocate Medicare for All to replace high business costs exacerbated by multiple commercial health insurance and big Pharma profiteering middlemen. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has stated, "Medical costs are the tapeworm of American economic competition." Employer health coverage is advanced by Congress members, recipients of large contributions from various sectors of the medical industrial complex, as revealed by www.OpenSecrets.org.

Re-posted 5-18-23, original post 2019 - Michele Swenson
Truthseekers - Health Justice Podcast