While we continue to piss our tax dollars away on bridges to nowhere in Alaska and nation-building in Iraq, the pressures on the health care system continue to build. If your employer pays for your health care, you may not know that a family of 3 can easily spend $700-$1,000 per month on health care premiums alone.
Everyone needs access to health care. As I have said before, it just doesn't make sense to make businesses bear that burden. I hope its only a matter of time before voters figure that out.
Today's headlines show the big boys continue to crumble.
Pressured GM Slashes Pay, Benefits
Dividend Is Cut in Half,
As Costs, Competition
Gang Up on Auto Giant
Toyota's U.S. Investment Push
By JOSEPH B. WHITE and LEE HAWKINS JR.
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 8, 2006
GM's move yesterday caps salaried retiree health benefits at 2006 levels starting in January 2007, affecting roughly 100,000 white-collar retirees and about 25,000 employees who have yet to retire. The company said it will freeze the accrual of pension benefits for salaried workers next month, and that it probably will replace GM's traditional defined benefit plan with a cash-balance plan or a 401(k) plan that would put more of the burden for retirement saving on workers. GM already had stopped offering retiree health coverage to salaried workers hired after Jan. 1, 1993, and it reached agreement last year with the United Auto Workers to pare union workers' health benefits.
As Americans we blather on about individual responsibility. Note that as employer-based retirements dwindle, the Federal systems need to pick up the slack unless individuals save enough on their own. Since our savings rate went NEGATIVE last quarter, dont hold your breath for any individual savings.
GM's Decision to Cut Pensions
Accelerates Broad Corporate Shift
Benefits Curb Follows
Path of Other Companies
On Worker Guarantees
The End of Retirement?
By DAVID WESSEL, ELLEN E. SCHULTZ and LAURIE MCGINLEY
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 8, 2006
"Our employer-based social-welfare system is collapsing," says Alicia Munnell, director of Boston College's Center for Retirement Research. "GM itself is not a big deal. It's GM on top of Verizon and IBM" -- which both recently froze some of their pension plans -- "and then there's everything that's happening in weak companies like airlines."
GM, which previously had stopped offering retiree health coverage to salaried workers hired after Jan. 1, 1993, said it would cap health-care spending for all other salaried retirees and their families at 2006 levels, forcing them to shoulder all future increases in health costs. The company said the move will save it $900 million a year, before taxes. It follows an agreement last year with the United Auto Workers to pare union workers' health benefits.
Alternative health-care plans arent exactly taking off. For a lot of us, that much-mocked Canadian system is starting to look pretty good (ie affordable).
Few Uninsured Workers Opt
For Employers' New Health Plans
By VANESSA FUHRMANS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 8, 2006
A bold initiative to bring health-care coverage to more than a million uninsured working Americans has gotten off to a rocky start.
A year ago, a coalition of 60 of the country's largest employers -- including General Electric Co., Avon Products Inc., International Business Machines Corp. and Sears Holdings Corp. -- announced a novel plan to sell affordable health-care coverage to as many as three million of their part-time, temporary and contract workers who weren't eligible for the companies' existing health insurance plans.
By pooling a large, diverse group of participants, the companies said, they'd be able to offer coverage at premiums lower than what workers could buy on their own.
But last month, when the National Health Access program went into effect, only 10 of the 60 employers were on board for the initial round. And just a fraction of possible participants -- 5,726 employees, with their dependents -- had signed up, 4,000 of them from one company alone.
The small numbers reflect the coalition's struggle to create a workable program, as it learns more about the pool of employees it has targeted and how to market and explain the products it is offering. These efforts underscore the challenges in selling commercial insurance products to the uninsured.
