The battle for Wichita’s small businesses to provide health insurance will be featured in tonight’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, at 6 p.m. on KPTS Channel 8.
Last month, show producers came to Wichita and interviewed WiBA president Tim Witsman, along with several small business owners.
The show is part of a series on the economy and health care issues facing the Obama administration. Spokesmen from WIBA member SD & S Trucking also were interviewed.
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I just watched Jim Lehrer’s News Hour news program on KPTS Channel 8. As mentioned in the opening thread, Jim Lehrer talked about the problems of small businesses providing health coverage to their relatively small groups of employees.
As stated, the healthy portion of the employee pool has to carry the unhealthy portion of the employee pool. Many times, it is more economical for healthy employees to change jobs rather than carry the high costs of a few unhealthy fellow employees.
And, in my opinion, it’s not necessarily the younger employees carrying the older employees. It’s the healthy employees vs the smokers, overweight, no exercise portion of the employees.
Once again, one answer must be to STOP getting health insurance through employee/employer situations. But the overhead of buying individual health insurance policies makes the cost too high also.
Larger health insurance pools are needed like WIBA and other similar organizations to moderate the costs somehow.
And Jim Lehrer mentioned the benefits of buying policies with higher deductibles to encourage individuals to shop around for their specific medical services.
For example, I am still convinced that the Part D, Prescription Drug program sponsored by the federal government is generally a ripoff of the senior citizens who qualify. But it must be very profitable because it is advertised and offered by many health insurance plans.
Incidentally, Jim Lehrer has Wichita ties. His father drove a bus from Wichita through Newton, Emporia to Olathe as I remember the story. I presume he went to a Wichita high school … anybody remember?
I don’t know, JW. I found the attempt to disconnect business from health insurance in John McCain’s platform little more than an attempt to pad the bottom line at an employee’s expense.
Not ready to try something so injurious to the middle and lower classes until government takes a stab at downsizing the healthcare golden goose.
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