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Health Care Important to All (Cont.)

April 15th, 2007 Posted by Mark

One other important distinction from this study came from the one out of three respondents who said that they were not happy with their health care benefits from their employers. Despite the fact that they were not happy with their health benefits, these employees still said that they did not want to stop getting any benefits from their employers and did not want to have to go out on their own to find health care benefits.

Also, according to the study, more than half of the workers interviewed for the survey said that they did not like the idea of having taxes put on the money that they would contribute to health care premiums. As the system is now, most of the time, when employees have to pay some premium into their healthcare benefits, that money is taken out of their pay checks pre tax. If you remember, one of the proposals put out by President Bush in his health care plan would be to stop allowing health care contributions to be non taxed.

Yet another interesting fact of the study is that those employees in the survey who did not smoke said it would be OK to charge more for health care to employees who did smoke. The idea is that smoking employees would have more health care problems down the road and end up costing more for the health plan to take care, thereby driving up costs for everyone. However, when it comes to obese people, the same did not apply. Employees in the survey did not believe it was fair to charge them more for health care, even though obesity is proven to also lead to more health problems and costs down the road.

Either way, what the survey proved, according to its creators, is that employees value their health care benefits more than ever.