Yeah, not so much, the UK and Australia are struggling terribly, the thing Americans with great insurance don’t realize is that how medical care is like a consumer sport vs something that in other countries is a rationed product. If you are sick enough to be a recoverable ICU pt, sure, NHS is fine. You need rehab with that? Rewhat? And care IS rationed. Like there might not be an ICU bed in your 50 mile radius. That means you possibly die if you are DX sick enough to be admitted to a UK ICU. And maybe there are no free ICU equipped ambulances and for sure there is no spare ICU doc and nurse for your transfer. The problem will never be solved.
It may also cause small employers to practice age discrimination against older people, due to older people bringing higher medical insurance costs with them. Even though it may be illegal, it is difficult enough to prove in an individual case that small employers may feel that they can get away with it in the hiring stage.
Care is rationed in the US by your insurance company, unless you self-pay without insurance, in which case you decide on your own rationing (or are forced to ration your own care if you are not wealthy).
Also, medical care as a consumer market is not working well in the US, since much medical care is not completely optional, and many people face non-competitive situations for choosing medical insurance and/or medical care. Price transparency is also poor for medical care in many situations.
@ChoatieMom, Everyone at this place can afford the health insurance because of the single-payer system there, since (maybe) 1995:
I heard of this joke (which may not be true, i.e., it is a myth only): When Japan colonized Taiwan before WW2, the only white collar career paths that were encouraged by the government were 1) engineers 2) doctors That is the reason why there are plenty of engineers and doctors there today. It is then easier to establish a national health insurance when they have enough doctors.
Does it really matter where mcat2’s employer operates? Rather isn’t it a question of the extent of the network of the insurance provider that mcat2’s employer gets their plan from?
For example, I work for a state university system (which obviously does not operate in any other states), but our insurance company has (I believe) a nation-wide network of healthcare providers…
At the moment, not many. It’s good that older workers are staying on the job. Maybe, if they all stay on the job until 70 or later, it may easy labor shortage, the burden of SS or medicare.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/older-workers-helped-fuel-recent-110000228.html
@Iglooo that’s an interesting article in some ways, although lumping people working and people looking for work into one group is not something I’ve seen before. (“The addition of these older workers not only contributed to economic growth, experts say, but helped stop a national decline in the share of adults working or looking for work.” ) I think the question about people working for health insurance is a hard one to answer cleanly. I agree with you that jobs don’t seem to be taken away from young people.
I am guessing they are referring to labor participation. Looking for work is participation, I assume.
I live in Northern California. The insurance companies in Northern California are different from those in Southern California. Also, the cost of health insurance between these two regions is very different (that in the north is much higher.)
If northern Californians were allowed to buy insurance from the companies in the Southern California and relied on such insurance, I would think many would do so. But this does not happen. Northern Californians are still locked into the high insurance rates here. So I believe it is not likely that I could get the COBRA insurance here and use it in a far away state.
Actually, in my previous company (which is smaller company than my current one), there was a special “multiple states” insurance policy that we could purchase. The employee needs to pay more for the premium for such an insurance policy. I think such an insurance policy is mainly for the spouse/dependents of the employee who live in another state. So some people really have such needs. But it seems my current company does not negotiate with the insurance company to provide such a policy as far as I know.
In this area and in the field where I work in, the younger workers have a much easier time to find their next job. It is almost like: You are young and you are in such a field, and you are not picky about the kind of companies you work for and the nature of the job, you would likely be able to land a job. I can hardly imagine that the older workers in this field are capable of taking away younger workers’ job, because the latter are more competitive as job seekers. Some CCers here once posted that anyone in this field who has a pulse could be hired right now.
Just want to add this in my last paragraph, a very high percentage of my coworkers in their 20s or 30s (in the past 5 years) jumped to a company like Apple, etc., after they had gained some experiences from the same jobs that we older workers were doing. There have been at least half a dozen of younger co-workers of mine who have done so in the past 5 years or so. We sometimes joked that one value we have for the younger generation is to pass to them our interview techniques that we have accumulated in our life time. But they can get the job but we can not. It is not that they do not disserve it. They do. When the project is close to the deadline, they are more capable of working days and nights and pull it off if needed. This kind of “quality” is what the hi-tech companies are looking for. (I am actually taking vacation now and wait for the flight later today. But I am still on my email on and off and try to get two groups of engineers across the “pond” to clarify some requirements.)
Back to the topic of retirees and their health insurance after or close to retirement.
DH wanted to retire a full year earlier than he did. He was self-employed so we always paid for our own health insurance, but with him working we had steady income to pay the premiums. Even though he hated working the extra year, I tried to reframe it for him by pointing out that paying for our health insurance was less of a burden while he worked and reduced the amount of time we’d have to dip into savings to pay those premiums.
“It may also cause small employers to practice age discrimination against older people, due to older people bringing higher medical insurance costs with them. Even though it may be illegal, it is difficult enough to prove in an individual case that small employers may feel that they can get away with it in the hiring stage.”
I’m confident this happens and not just among small employers.
@mcat2, if the only thing stopping you from retiring at 65 is one year of insurance for your wife, I am pretty sure you could find it through an insurance exchange. If you work for a large company, it may “self insure” and just use an insurance company to negotiate with providers and process claims. I am 53 and live in SoCal, I pay for a Blue Shield PPO plan and it costs around $750/month. I buy it through the exchange (Covered CA) but I am not eligible for subsidies. Btw, my children are covered under their dad’s insurance which is also a Blue Shield PPO. Our daughter goes to college in NY and had to be hospitalized. It was all covered, but there were some co-pays. If you look outside of HMO plans, there is coverage all over the country, it is just expensive. But for one year, it could cover your wife before Medicare kicks in.
Our health insurer is a HI company but it is a blue cross blue shield and has agreements with anthem and other BCBS insurers to provide care at network rates wherever we travel in the US.
The 30 year old comes with a $12k per year discount on medical (insurance) costs compared to a 60 year old. So if they are otherwise equal in both desirability and pay rate, the employer has a strong incentive to choose the younger one.
So the 60 year old has to be $12k per year better or cheaper (in pay rate) to be competitive with the 30 year old.
Yes, the linkage of medical insurance to employment is a powerful incentive for age discrimination against older people (and also somewhat for discrimination against women of child bearing age relative to men of that age). (Yes, there are other reasons that age discrimination exists, but employer medical insurance adds to them.)
Many plans cover occasional use of out of area medical services while traveling, but expect you to buy a plan for the new area when you move.
30-year-old me was making less than half of what I make now, and was willing to work harder/longer hours. This dwarfs a $12k difference in health insurance.
Plus, unless that company is really small, one person isn’t going to move the needle much on a negotiated group rate.
The wife of the longterm (now deceased) Princeton professor, Uwe Reinhardt, that was referred in my post #15103, recently authored an article about the topic about health care cost in US vs Taiwan:
https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20190206.305164/full/
(I wonder whether the author came from Taiwan originally and now lives in America? The spelling of her name indicates she might. If Uwe Reinhardt did help bringing up the health care system in Taiwan between 1989 and 1995, he contributed to the well-being of the people there immensely. It is ironic that a professor in an America university could help the people elsewhere but he was unable to do the same for his own country.)
@screkeeper1, my current insurance is Blue Shield PPO (Northern California version.) Thanks.
Taiwan’s population is comparable maybe to Florida if you put all the people in a 1/4 of the state’s surface area.