Health Insurance Enrollment Quotes

In her book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler reports that 96 percent of American adults have relied on a major government program at some point in their lives. Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans' generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $6oo billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent). Altogether, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget. Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top I percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can't tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I've met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.

Nearly half a million people chose health plans through HealthCare.gov during the first week of the new open-enrollment period in the online insurance marketplace, federal health officials announced Wednesday.

HMOs have been so successful that they now occupy a dominant position in the market for health care in the United States. Approximately forty-five million Americans are uninsured. Of the remainder, about half are enrolled in some type of HMO. Most others receive some sort of managed care plan. Less than 10 per cent of Americans still have classic fee-for-service private health insurance (down from more than 70 per cent in the late ’80s). So even though many people equate HMOs with private health care, these sorts of corporations exist only because of the failure of private markets to supply appropriate health care. HMOs succeed precisely because they are more efficient than insurance markets. There should be no illusions about the character of these organizations—they are giant bureaucracies. The largest of them, Kaiser Permanente, employs over eleven thousand physicians and has more than six million subscribers in the state of California alone. This makes Kaiser larger than most of the government-run health care systems in Canada. And while the Canadian system is extremely decentralized, Kaiser Permanente is a single, vertically integrated corporation.

Domains of Human Concerns: Common Types of Possibilities For Action 1. BODY: exercise, medical checkups, traveling to an appointment. 2. PLAY or AESTHETICS: taking a vacation, going to the movies, going to an art museum, painting, putting a puzzle together. 3. SOCIABILITY: inviting a new person into a conversation, meeting an old friend, declaring a person trustworthy or untrustworthy. 4. FAMILY: getting married, sending children to college. 5. WORK: finishing a report, writing a letter. 6. EDUCATION: enrolling in a class, reading a book. 7. CAREER: choosing a major in college, getting a new job. 8. MONEY or PRUDENCE: investing money, bargaining for a new salary, buying health insurance. 9. MEMBERSHIP: joining a professional organization, becoming a citizen of a new country, founding a new club. 10. WORLD: working in a political campaign, visiting another country or culture.        11. DIGNITY: declaring pride in your work, declaring that your work is significant or insignificant, declaring standards of action for yourself to live up to.        12. SITUATION: declaring that your future is good or not good, declaring that you have more possibilities than you have been seeing, declaring that you have fewer possibilities in life than you supposed, discussing your possibilities with other persons. 13. SPIRITUALITY: reflecting on the facticity of life, going to church, philosophical discussions with others.

Only a quarter of families who qualify for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families apply for it. Less than half (48 percent) of elderly Americans who qualify for food stamps sign up to receive them. One in five parents eligible for government health insurance (in the form of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program) do not enroll, just as one in five workers who qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit do not claim it.