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Health "benefits"?: Oh well...

We meet them all the time:  people trapped in their job, in order to keep their health benefits.  

We need a study on the negative impact on entrepreneurship and the economy from people health-handcuffed to their current jobs.  From my limited anecdoctal evidence, the costs are astronomical.  

Two-income families have made the labor market much more geographically immobile, and now health insurance is exacerbating the job-jail.

Modern Healthcare just summarized results of a new Peterson-Kaiser study on employer health insurance and the actual cost to employee families, of the combination of employee share of premiums plus employee out-of-pocket health costs. Employers keep shifting more and more health costs to employees.

The only good news is that employers are still paying a (fast-shrinking) % of premiums--so health costs are still cheaper than being self-employed.  [Also, if we end up back in the uncovered pre-existing conditions bad-old-days again, expensive employer health insurance still looks better than no insurance at all.]

We live in a democracy, with a lot of working-class families barely getting by.  As we exceed 10% of personal income going to health costs for an ever-larger % of families, the political pressure for "Medicare-for-All" will increase.  If the GOP doesn't come up with a real (i.e., non-fake) credible universal health coverage alternative, I continue to predict single-payer in the 2021-2033 timeframe.

And real/non-fake means: no small federal block grants to states for a fig-leaf pre-existing conditions "pool".  People may not have vision care anymore, but they can increasingly see through those political-campaign PR charades.  They've already seen through "Medicare vouchers", so don't expect them to put up with inadequate pseudo-coverage "solutions" anymore, either.

And since we at Edunuity and Healthy Future US are all about prevention:  it is more critical than ever to develop healthier whole-population habits, starting preK-12, to reduce our massive health care cost burden.  Whether we keep & reform the status quo system, or move to Medicare-for-All, or whatever--we must help Americans of all ages to develop healthier behavior, in order for us to reduce health costs to an affordable sustainable level--and for Americans to lead much healthier lives. 

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