- Real average hourly earnings are down 2.5 percent since Election Day 2020 and real median usual weekly earnings are down 3.2 percent. That latter compares with an 8.0 percent gain over the previous four years.
- Today it takes nearly 60 percent of a median family’s income to cover a mortgage on a median-priced home. The standard historically has been around 30 percent.
Category: Public Insurance
Wednesday Links
- A proposal: for reference pricing – why aren’t insurance companies and employers doing this?
- Cato’s Human Freedom Index: Switzerland is No. 1. The US is No. 17
- 3 million children have been dropped from Medicaid and CHIP this year.
- Homelessness is surging in blue states and blue cities.
- Bernie Sanders to introduce bill to restrict US drug prices to the prices paid by other developed countries. (Some similarity to a Trump policy that Biden rescinded.) InsideHealthPolicy — Gated
The Atlantic: Destigmatizing Hard Drug Use is a Huge Mistake
In high-income cities recently there were billboards filled with young, attractive, smiling people. The caption read “Drink with friends,” explaining if you drink & drive, ask a friend to go with you to help steer, watch for oncoming traffic and tell you when you’re swerving out of your lane. If that sounds utterly ridiculous that’s because it is. Except, drinking wasn’t the topic of the billboards, fentanyl use was.
Report: Self-Insured Employer Plan Prices Not as Low as Insurers
Nearly 100 million people have health coverage through self-insured employer plans. Self-insured health plans are arrangements where large employers take on the risk of their employees’ medical costs rather than purchasing coverage through an insurer. One advantage of self-insurance is that self-insured plans are regulated by the federal government, rather than states laws. In addition, some employers may have healthy workers and can assume the risk of employee health needs cheaper than insuring them.