Refuting the belief that workers’ healthcare premiums are largely paid for by employers and the government, two policy experts aver that workers and households instead pay for health insurance through lower wages and higher prices.
Writing in a March 5 JAMA commentary, “Who Really Pays for Health Care? The Myth of ‘Shared Responsibility,’” Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD, of the department of bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, and Victor Fuchs, PhD, of the department of economics at Stanford University, discuss the “misconception” that employers and the government pay a significant share of U.S. healthcare costs. According to the authors, employer-sponsored health benefits are a component of overall worker compensation, and the government increases taxes on the current population, borrows from future generations, or cuts other necessary programs to pay for increases in healthcare costs. The authors also discuss how the “myth of shared responsibility” makes it difficult to remove employers as part of efforts to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system. Read the extract.
