Some Labor Day Health Care Cost History - and My Intro Video!!!

Here’s a Labor Day history lesson – to equip and empower working Americans.

Did you know that employer-sponsored health benefits are almost as old as America itself? In 1798 John Adams, the second U.S. president, signed a law that took 20 cents per month from the paychecks of U.S. seamen to fund their medical care. After the Civil War, lumber, mining, and railroad companies needed health care services as they blazed a trail across the American West. So they withheld money from employee paychecks to pay for doctors and hospitals.

The modern insurance era can be pegged to the start of the Blue Cross plans, in 1929, with a plan for Dallas schoolteachers. The employer-based system became entrenched when wages were frozen during World War II. Employers lure the best workers with more generous benefits.

The system has metastasized. Health care providers and insurers are making record profits. But the costs have increased to the point that they are the number one financial concern of working Americans. Tens of millions of working Americans are priced out of the system, and 1 in 5 has medical debt in collections!

How does this relate to you and me?

1. The health benefits provided by employers are paid by employee compensation. This is OUR money being consumed by our health care system, not someone else’s. You wouldn’t let a hospital or insurance company siphon money directly out of your bank account. But that’s exactly what’s happening when your health insurance deductibles and premiums rise and rise and rise.

2. The high cost of health care is not justified. Researchers estimate that about 25% of all health care spending is squandered. Savvy employers and patients are pushing back. They are saving hundreds or even thousands of dollars per health care encounter.

3. Employers have done very little to protect working Americans from the health care system’s financial pitfalls.

I’m taking on this problem and I’d like you to PLEASE HELP. The launch of my book, “Never Pay the First Bill: And Other Ways to Fight the Health Care System and Win,” has been a huge success. The book shows working Americans how to avoid and contest overcharges and come out on top. Now I’m turning the book into a series of educational health literacy videos that will be even more accessible to working Americans.

Here's how you can join me. Please support my Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign so I can pay for the editing, graphics and animation for the videos. There are great rewards for donors. But hopefully you will be spurred on by the knowledge that you’ll be helping employers and working Americans fight a system that’s been preying on them financially for decades.

Click on the link below to see my INTRO VIDEO and to see how you can partner with me to empower employers and working Americans!