Health Care Cost Jeopardizing Jobs of Self-Employed?

Health insurance costs are on the rise while growth and employment is at an all time low.  There is no secret that the US economy, is suffering during these recession times.  The same holds true for other global economies as well. However, most western economies have a universal system for medical care, which is funded by the government.  The USA has a private system for the most part and the private system is very expensive.

The fact that 47 million Americans are either unemployed or under employed is a major problem today.  Medical costs and services continue to rise each year and this inevitably has a direct result on the economy.  These rising costs have been directly associated with the decline of growth and employment, that is according to a recent Rand Corporation performance survey of 38 different industries in America, The Rand Corporation studied the relationship between economic growth and rising health care between 1987 through to 2005.   Researchers found that the industries, which experienced the least economic growth and expansion, were also the industries that had originally provided the most health insurance coverage.

Among these industries were manufacturing and finance, two industries in which one would find self-employed individuals.  New self-employed individuals starting out for the first time are not seeing the profits they had originally expected, nor do they have the health insurance benefits because of the high cost.  Other self-employed individuals became quite disillusioned when they left their former jobs in these industries, and others such as agriculture, legal services, hotel and retail, to find that they no longer had the same benefits they once did.  The price of getting good coverage doubled and tripled in some instances. According to the Rand study, 120,800 jobs are lost for every time health care cost exceeds the gross domestic product by 10 percent per annum. These lost revenues add up to $28 billion dollars.  These horrendous figures directly affect self-employed individuals who already have small, or volatile businesses.

It seems to be a vicious cycle where small business owners and the self-employed need health care, and they buy it as outrageous costs.  The costs in turn cannot be written off as a business expense, yet the coverage is badly needed.  Purchasing self-employed coverage can be so expensive that it eats up most of the business income or profit.  Without proper coverage the self-employed and their family will not have the care and services they need.  However, if they sacrifice for the cost of decent coverage, they may also sacrifice their business. Therefore the question remains, how many more jobs will be lost because of these hard economic times and how many more individuals and self-employed are going to go without basic care?