Latest news with #KathrynAnneEdwards
Gulf Today
3 days ago
- Health
- Gulf Today
Williams exposed all that's wrong with health insurance
Kathryn Anne Edwards, Tribune News Service Venus Williams returned to the professional tennis circuit in July with a win in the first round of the DC Open. (She lost in a late round.) In an interview on the court following the match, the 45-year-old made a somewhat surprising admission on why she decided to return to competitive tennis. 'I had to come back for the insurance because they informed me earlier this year I'm on COBRA," she said, referring to the federal law that allows individuals to temporarily continue their employer-sponsored health insurance after leaving a job by paying the premiums. Williams has made more than $40 million in prize money during her tennis career and has a net worth estimated to be almost $100 million. There's little worry she'd become uninsured due to lack of funds. Still, her comments get at the problem buried so deep into our system of health insurance that no policymaker has the nerve to touch it, which is that health and work shouldn't be linked. Although America's system of health insurance is built on employer-sponsored coverage, there's scant labour market or health justification for this arrangement. The strongest part of the system is the depth of entrenched interests, rather than, say, producing good health outcomes, controlling costs or providing coverage to as many people as possible. Yet, policymakers have made clear that rather than rock this boat, they'd prefer to wait for it to tip over on its own. Congress's lack of stewardship over health insurance dates back to its origins. The first such plan in the US was offered by Baylor University Hospital to Dallas public school teachers in 1929. The architect was a former teacher working in the hospital's administration who came up with a monthly subscription plan in exchange for future hospital stays. After adding more professions and hospitals, it became Blue Cross. The American Medical Association, seeing the success of the American Hospital Association's new experiment, began to offer non-hospital physicians plans, which became Blue Shield. Dropped into this swirling mix of loosely linked occupations, hospitals, doctors, and monthly payments for negotiated care was the multi-year wage freezes of World War II. Employer-paid plans were exempt from these freezes, the costs of plans were deemed to be a business expense, and the benefits were not counted as income. After the war, the Internal Revenue Service solidified the twice-over tax preference as part of the Internal Revenue Code. At no point did policymakers articulate a design to provide health insurance for Americans through their employers. Each successive Congress has instead inherited a system whose circumstantial origins were cemented into something permanent but not planned. The lack of planning is evident when considering the myriad miseries the system creates. Where to begin. First, health insurance is not only expensive for employers to provide, but employers are not equally financially capable of bearing the costs. As a result, larger firms get to provide better coverage than smaller firms, which are at a disadvantage to negotiate things such as insulin costs. On top of which, employees of small firms on average a pay higher share of the total premium as well as face a higher deductible than employees of large firms. Disparity in health-insurance offerings mars the labour market. Productivity is maximised when workers and firms are matched based on their human capital. But throw insurance into the mix, and employers can be boxed out when competing for workers based on their health offerings and workers can warp their job search and tenure based on which employers provide the best health plan. The latter is called job lock, and it's a good description of Williams' experience: Staying at a job mostly for the health insurance. It's a bad situation for workers and employers. Health insurance also mars compensation. There's evidence that workers who can be identified as adding to health costs, such as women of child-bearing age who may become pregnant or obese individuals, are paid less as a result. This is on top of the broader suppression of wage growth and labor demand experienced by all workers as a result of employer health costs. What's truly bad about this whole system is that tying health insurance to work creates coverage gaps that the government must fill. Indeed, the evolution of public health insurance has been about Congress trying to fill holes employers leave behind. And in these holes fall some of the most expensive people or situations to insure. Medicaid covers 35% of all disabled individuals in the US, 61% of all long-term care recipients, and 41% of all births while Medicare covers 80% of all deaths. As a macabre aside, the most expensive year of life is the last one, and end-of-life care is half of Medicare spending. In essence, employers are 'skimming the top,' insuring younger and higher income Americans and avoiding the oldest, poorest, chronically disabled, or dying. And the government sinks a fortune into supporting this system. The tax-preferred status of health insurance benefits that opts employers and employees out of income or payroll tax duties on those benefits totaled $384 billion in 2024. Although the Affordable Care Act added some regulations and mandates to employer benefits, most of the bill's thrust was to cover those left out of the employer market by subsidising the individual market and expanding Medicaid. It was a compromise policy. What's incredible about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is that it dismantles much of the ACA's wraparound coverage, already weakened by the Supreme Court decision that made Medicaid expansion optional. It's a rejection of the compromise that propped up the employer-sponsored system, a system so rife with problems that even a wealthy professional tennis legend will admit her career is a function of needing access to consistent health insurance. Either employer-sponsored health insurance is worth all the costs, inefficiencies, and problems, and Congress works around it, or it's an 80-year experiment with enough evidence of failure that it's time to move on to the next system. Sitting on the shore and waiting for the boat to sink isn't enough.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Venus Williams Exposed Health Insurance Defects
Venus Williams returned to professional tennis due to insurance reasons, citing her need to pay for COBRA, a federal law that allows individuals to temporarily continue their employer-sponsored health insurance. The US system of health insurance is built on employer-sponsored coverage, which has "scant labor market or health justification" and is driven by "entrenched interests" rather than producing good health outcomes. Bloomberg's Kathryn Anne Edwards has more on the story.
Bloomberg
05-08-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Swiss Leader to Travel to Washington to Discuss Tariffs
"Bloomberg Markets" follows the market moves across every global asset class and discusses the biggest issues for Wall Street. Today's guests: Williams President and CEO Chad Zamarin and Bloomberg's Kathryn Anne Edwards. (Source: Bloomberg)
Bloomberg
05-08-2025
- Health
- Bloomberg
Venus Williams Exposed Health Insurance Defects
Venus Williams returned to professional tennis due to insurance reasons, citing her need to pay for COBRA, a federal law that allows individuals to temporarily continue their employer-sponsored health insurance. The US system of health insurance is built on employer-sponsored coverage, which has "scant labor market or health justification" and is driven by "entrenched interests" rather than producing good health outcomes. Bloomberg's Kathryn Anne Edwards has more on the story. (Source: Bloomberg)
Gulf Today
06-06-2025
- Business
- Gulf Today
Why Medicaid work requirements won't work
Kathryn Anne Edwards, Tribune News Service The US labour market is a truly astonishing thing to behold. It includes 171 million Americans, as young as 14 and older than 90, some who never finished elementary school and others with PhDs. It is resilient and dynamic, shrinking during recessions but growing again after. It provides the majority of Americans with the majority of their income. All of which is to say: It is common to look to the labor market as a kind of salve for all economic wounds. Whatever the problem is, the solution is to get people working. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. For all its strength, the labor market is encumbered by the low-wage labor market — where work doesn't support a stable living, and where jobs are so bad they're more salt than salve. This is a reality that Republicans in Congress, in their current push to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, ignore. They are making policy for a labor market that doesn't exist. The 'low-wage labor market' is a vague designation. It's typically defined as those workers who have relatively or absolutely low hourly earnings, such as the bottom quintile or quarter of wage earners, or earners below some nominal wage cutoff. Whatever the definition, however, there are some aspects of the low-wage labor market that are obvious: The low-wage labor market is large. At least 39 million workers in the US earn less than $17 an hour, which is the equivalent of $35,360 annually. That is just below 138% of the poverty threshold for a family of three — the income needed for parents to be eligible for Medicaid in states that expanded it under the Affordable Care Act. Earnings in the low-wage labor market are volatile. Earnings volatility measures change in wage income from one month to the next. Instability at both the very top and very bottom is so great that economists have a term for it: the 'wild ride.' Recent research from the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project shows that low-wage earners see more spikes and dips in income than any other group, with the dips being especially large. They have the most volatile earnings when measured by the coefficient of variation, regardless of whether the household has a single or multiple earners. That volatility can be partly attributed to unpredictable hours. Many low-wage earners are employed in shift work, in which their hours and schedule can vary week to week, often with little notice. According to Harvard's Shift Project, two-thirds of workers in retail and food service get less than two weeks' notice of their schedule, half get less than one week's notice, and 70% report that the timing of their scheduled shifts changes at least once a month. This flexibility is more likely to be imposed by employers rather than requested by employees; the more volatile the hours, the fewer hours typically worked. Low-wage jobs usually also have low-quality benefits. Of private-sector workers in the bottom 25% of the wage distribution, 30% do not have access to any type of leave, whether it is sick, holiday, vacation or personal. Some 56% do not have access to an employer-sponsored health-care plan, while 84% do not have access to an employer-sponsored dental plan. And 50% do not have access to a defined-contribution retirement plan. The bottom line is clear. Working Americans are eligible for social benefits such as Medicaid not only because their pay isn't high enough, but also because it isn't reliable enough. Classic labour theory holds that workers are balancing two conflicting goals: the consumption of purchased goods, and the consumption of leisure time. The former requires time at work; the latter requires time away from work. It is up to the worker to calibrate how much of each they want. Of course, economists will try to predict how workers and consumers will react to any change in their earnings. If a worker gets a wage increase, the 'income effect' would push them to work less: They can still consume the same amount of purchased goods but also have more leisure time. Alternatively, a wage increase could trigger the 'substitution effect,' pushing them to work more: The price of leisure (foregone wages) is now more expensive. But what if that worker gets a non-wage increase from a public benefit? There is no substitution effect, just the income effect — that is, they would work less. This is the economic foundation for the idea that public benefits discourage work. Work requirements are meant to counter this incentive. It sounds reasonable. But for at least 39 million Americans, work brings low wages, unstable earnings, unpredictable hours and few benefits.
