Who pays for health care?

While you may not be able to tell from reading this blog, health care is an interest of mine. This article (which is based on a paper in this week's JAMA) takes on the intersection of health care and employer relations.

What does this mean, exactly? Simple: “the common claim that employers, government, and households all pay for health care is false. Employers do not share fiscal responsibility and employers do not pay for health care.” In fact, the “money [for health care] comes from [our] own pockets.”

Well, no kidding. No rational employer gives a rat's behind whether they're spending their compensation dollars on cash, health care, or free donuts in the break room; they do what enables them to keep their employers happy. In today's tax environment, often that's health care. With that said, dollars spent on health care are dollars that come out of somewhere else; they have to. The customers will only pay so much for whatever good or service is being produced; there's only so many dollars to go around. What comes out of one pot necessarily comes out of another.

With that said, the statistics you so often see about the stagnation of middle class wages leave out the dramatically increasing health-care part of the compensation package. The fact that people have chosen to take more health care benefits instead of wages represents the people's choice, not a decline in living standards. I may do a post on that in the future once I dig up some of the stats.