Why is healthcare tied to the workplace? [View All]

[MountainLaurel]

LIKE MOST HEALTH policy researchers, Bob Moffit and Susan Sered have long been obsessed by the vexing question: Why is America the only industrialized country to link health insurance so closely to employment?

Moffit, who directs the Center for Health Policy Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, says ''it's nuts" that nine out of 10 Americans with private health insurance get coverage through their employers. ''Imagine if auto insurance worked the same way," says Moffit. ''So, if you lost your job, you could no longer drive. That would be profoundly absurd."

Sered, a researcher at the Center for Women's Health and Human Rights at Suffolk University, stands at the other end of the political spectrum from Moffit, yet on this particular point she sees eye-to-eye with him. ''Employer-sponsored care is the main reason for the crisis of the uninsured," she said in an interview.

In ''Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity" (University of California Press), Sered and coauthor Rushika Fernandopulle, a primary-care physician and clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, argue that precisely because healthcare and employment in America are linked, job loss can often have dire consequences-namely, what they call the ''death spiral." Without reliable medical care, unemployed individuals, who often have too many assets to qualify for Medicaid, become more prone to developing serious illnesses and hence less employable. Eventually, many are forced to leave the workforce permanently, and some become a statistic-18,000 Americans, according to a report by the Institute of Medicine, die every year because of the lack of health insurance.

http://www.boston.com/business/healthcare/articles/2005/10/16/why_is_healthcare_tied_to_the_workplace/