Vox.com
Knowledge Isn't Power When Managing Health Care Costs
June 01, 2018
Both the KHN/NPR and Vox projects started in 2018, but stories about inexplicably high medical bills are not new. Major news organizations have been shocking readers with reports of shameless health care price gouging for years. Journalist, Steven Brill's 2013 article, "America's Bitter Pill…" in Time Magazine, grabbed the nation's attention like no other health care price article has before or since. In fact, Brill's blockbuster article likely inspired NPR and Vox's current medical bill review projects, as well as several bestselling books on the subject.
Meanwhile, a similar information campaign about income/wealth inequality is also cause for outrage. But if the response to news about income/wealth inequality is any indication, what can we expect the stories about health care price gouging to accomplish? Remember Occupy Wall Street and Fight For $15—how participants in these movements were mocked as naïve losers out to take from the makers? And how Republican lawmakers enacted tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals to punctuate the defeat of these groups? It's not hard to believe that this is the fate of the health care price outrage campaign. For every successful teachers' strike there is an annual health insurance premium increase to gobble up any negotiated benefits increase. Continue Reading...
Comments
Americans Know Workplace Health Insurance Is Subsidized By The Federal Government, They Just Don't Care
March 02, 2015
I’m a big fan of the Vox.com website. The writers at Vox are good at making a point and supporting it with relevant data. Another reason I like the site is because they write a lot about health care in America and abroad. They cover Obamacare better than all the major news outlets because they focus on informing readers and not the latest headlines. However, when Vox writers use the results of a poll to make a point, I kind of wish they didn’t.
Polls ask simple questions without providing examples or definitions of the terminology it uses. So when Vox writer, Matthew Yglesias, wrote an article based on the results of a poll question in which nearly all of the respondents said that they did not receive a government subsidy to pay for health insurance, I was like, ‘meh.’ But because it came from Vox.com, I decided to look at all of the results from The Economist/YouGov poll referenced in the article.
Now, as an employee benefit professionals, I know that a lot of workers:
- Don’t understand taxes in general,
- Can’t conceptualize how pre-tax health and retirement benefits work, and
- Don’t know that subsidies can come in the form of tax savings
Denise Perkins
