Employees Health Care Vanishing
October 16, 2008
Decline of Health Care Coverage
The Cost of a DeValued Dollar is just beginning to show its ugly face in the public. The most obvious effect (or the one most people complain about) is the price of oil, but what about the future of US Health Care? Most employees in the US are confident that their employers will have Health Care coverage or that coverage can be purchased easily…this is no longer the case.
A Briefing from the Economic Policy Instute of Washington, DC recently said that Employer Sponsored Health Care has dropped from 68.3% in 2000 to 62.9% in 2007. Public Insurance Coverage has dropped from 18.5% to 14.9%. Click here for a copy of the Briefing.
When the Dot Com bubble exploded in the late 1990′s, the US government and Wall Street had a choice…to let a Recession happen so that the dollar and the market could fix prices to where they were supposed to be…or to flood the market with more “liquidity”. Greenspan (Fed Chairman at the time) chose to flood the market with liquidity, giving the illusion of prosperity for the United States but delaying the inevitable decline that we are experiencing now. The decline HAS been happening rapidly since that time (though most didn’t see it because of the brief properity offered by an inflated money supply), which means the dollar has been steadily getting weaker, and health care has become harder to provide.
Bare in mind that the numbers listed above only discuss the change from 2000 to 2007, none of the recent downturns in the economy are being discussed. This drop in coverage will continue and the rate of decline with become faster with each day that the dollar drops in value. If you rely on your Health Insurance then it would benefit you to look into another form of coverage from a more reliable source than your employer.
