Health insurance represents 7.8% of employee
compensation, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics—but that belies its importance to most American
workers, and its significance in the lives of most plan
sponsors.
A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll claims that
nearly a quarter (23%) of respondents said that, within the
past year, they or a member of their household have either
taken a new job or stuck with their current job (turned
down a new one) primarily because of better health
benefits.
In addition, 7% said that, in the past year, they or
someone in their household decided to get married in order
to have access to a spouse's health-care benefits, or
so a spouse could have access to their benefits. Nearly
three-fourths (71%) of American workers fear losing health
insurance if they change jobs, according to a survey
released by the AFL-CIO.
Little wonder, then, that health care—or more
specifically, health-care reform—has surfaced as an issue
for all the major U.S. presidential aspirants. Not that the
issue is a new one on the national scene.
In 1993, then-first lady, now Senator, Hillary Clinton
(D-New York) headed the Task Force on National Health Care
Reform, a commission that infamously galvanized a
nationwide backlash against "Hillarycare"—a
backlash that found faces in a series of "Harry and
Louise" commercials that featured a couple sitting
around the kitchen table fretting about what the government
would do to their health care ("having choices we
don't like is no choice at all").
That program, developed in highly controversial secret
sessions, culminated in proposed legislation that the
conservative Heritage Foundation charged would create a
"massive top-down, bureaucratic command-and-control system
that would meticulously govern virtually every aspect of
the delivery and the financing of health-care services for
the American people."
However, that, as they say, was then—a time when a
"mere" 37 million Americans were without health insurance.
Today, that number has swollen to a little less than 47
million, and roughly 19 million of those are drawing a
paycheck (of those, 14% were not eligible for coverage
under their workplace plan, 30% declined coverage, and the
rest had no workplace coverage at their place of
employment).
More significantly, even the 162 million who do have
health insurance—and roughly 61% owe that reality to
insurance made available through their workplace—are
struggling to keep up with soaring health-care costs.