The short answer is yes.
Right now, you may be fortunate enough to work in a state that extends the pay-for-over-40-hours-per-week part of Federal regulations to salaried employees, forcing them to be paid straight time, even time-and-a-half, for hours worked over 40 per week. If you are, congratulations.
If you’re not, though, you might find yourself in a salaried position with consistent “business emergencies” that mean you have to work long hours on a regular basis. Your health is being compromised by lack of sleep; you don’t have the energy for exercise and you’ve put it off until the long hours stop; you’ve gone from cooking healthy foods to stuff you can eat in the car so you can go straight to bed when you get home. You’re probably too tired to find a different job, and you know if you changed jobs, you’d probably end up in the same situation anyway. Every time the boss fires someone, you’ve noticed it’s on trumped up charges that really aren’t valid, and you know you’ve likely made enough errors, due to fatigue, to qualify for the same treatment – a treatment that ensures you won’t be eligible for unemployment, and you won’t find it easy to get a good job – in fact, you’ll be lucky to get day work if you stand on the street corner. So you give them whatever they demand, while your family and friends become estranged by your inability to devote time to the relationships.
And it could all be solved by them hiring – or not firing – people so that there are enough for everyone to do the job, do it right, and do it without working much, if any, overtime.
Employing more people is what stops recession. More workers, more income, more spending, more business. Simplistic as it sounds, it works. And full time, as well as some permanent part time, employees usually obtain health insurance through their jobs. That means the more people who are employed, the more people who have health insurance.
Of course, there have to be some laws and fiscal incentives, some shifting of tax breaks away from exhorbitant CEO salaries and perks and towards providing real health insurance – not this $5000 a year deductible stuff that never pays anything. Insurance companies do need to stop with the pre-existing conditions clauses. The IRS needs to limit CEO salary tax breaks to an amount not exceeding 10 times the pay of the lowest paid employee. If the board still wants to pay the CEO way too much, the tax break won’t be there for them. Instead, the tax breaks will be there for providing all employees, regardless of FTE status, health insurance at one flat rate.
It might not be a bad idea to make it difficult for businesses to hire mostly casual and part time workers, then call them in and work them full time but not provide them benefits; perhaps a law that mandates a certain percentage of employees must be full time – perhaps 85%? And it might be nice if larger businesses were allowed to extend healthcare coverage to entrepreneurs starting small businesses, for the same cost the large company’s employees pay, forming an informal – or formal – co-op. Insurers would have more people paying in. We’d have more people with healthcare coverage from their jobs.
Medicare and Medicaid have huge administrative costs and arcane rules for reimbursement. They have steadily decreased compensation for hospitals and physicians, to the point where any hospital with most patients on Medicare or Medicaid (or both) are running in the red from the combination of decreased reimbursement, slow-pay/no-pay practices, denials and appeals, and the drop in privately insured patients due to the recession. Every time a private insurer cuts reimbursement or denies a claim, you can be certain Medicare and Medicaid did the cuts/denials first. So in essence, what’s ruining healthcare in the U.S. are the very federal programs to which so many point as a solution.
There are solutions out there that don’t involve socialized medicine. I’ve proposed one. Americans are the most creative, ingenious people on the planet; we can find something better than the broken socialized medicine programs of small countries overseas, programs that betray those who believed they would be a solution. No country does as much innovation or as much research into diseases and cures as does the United States of America. We are the only real game in town for most medical research. We can’t kill that and replace it with Medicare for all. We have to find a way to make the equation Private Insurance for All.
Employing more benefited people is the first step.
