Driving Away Jobs

Fareed Zakaria’s “How We Drive Our Jobs Away” in the April 18, 2005 edition of Newsweek brings up several different points about the problems with the healthcare system in the United States. He does this through the narrow perspective of one industry’s economical woes and the necessary steps they have taken to save money by taking their business to foreign countries.

Because of the massive health-care costs of its workers, such companies as General Motors, Ford, and Daimler-Chrysler are taking their factories elsewhere. Zakaria uses General Motors as an example, citing that they spend $5.2 billion every year on healthcare coverage for both their active and retired workers. The cost of this comes back to the consumers in the form of an additional $1500 to every GM car sold.

Companies who produce their vehicles outside of the U.S. have a much lower additional rate added to their cars to cover the health costs for their employees. Toyota’s grand total is $186 per car, and he states that when China and India begin making cars for the U.S. and Europe that the additional cost will be less than $50 per car.

This is a reoccuring financial crisis across many companies in the U.S., not just car manufacturers. One solution is for companies to stop covering healthcare for their employees. Still, someone’s got to pay for that... and we’re straining our messed up governmental Medicare and Medicaid systems as they are.

Some say, that if people were paying for their own healthcare they would be more reserved with how they use it and therefore cut back on its costs. Still, the American healthcare is not a “free market”, but is supported through government funding - which is not guaranteed to continue to be there with the way things are going around here.

Canada’s “single-payer” healthcare program costs $209 billion less than the U.S. spends on its administrative costs for their health system..

My opinion still stands: socialized medicine,