Word: pay
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Pay Companies to Hire People If we want firms to go out and hire, why not give them an economic incentive to do so? This could be done by flat-out paying companies to hire, or by reducing their share of payroll taxes (the money that gets withheld from workers' paychecks to pay for Social Security and Medicare). Either way, adding a new worker becomes cheaper. We last tried this in the 1970s - the mechanism was a tax credit for hiring - and the results weren't particularly remarkable, though part of that could have had something to do with...
...would be. First of all, it is misleading to imply that companies aren't hiring because workers aren't cheap enough. As Dale Mortensen, a professor of economics at Northwestern University, points out, workers are a real bargain right now. Unit labor costs - how much a company has to pay people to produce a unit of whatever it is that the company makes - have been flat or falling for all of 2009. Between the second and third quarters, labor costs dropped at an annual rate of 2.5%. "If you just look at the cost side, this should be a labor...
...program - called the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act - would be funded by premiums and would pay enrollees $50 or more per day if they became too disabled to perform normal daily activities like eating and bathing. Employers who chose to participate would sign up their employees, who would then have the ability to opt out. The cash benefits could be applied to nursing-home care, but in an effort to encourage enrollees to stay in their own homes, payouts could cover such things as wheelchair ramps and wages for home health care aides...
Home care is much cheaper than nursing-home care, which averages about $200 per day. Yet millions of Americans who need long-term care but can't afford to pay for it have to "spend down" all their assets, become poor enough to qualify for Medicaid and then move to nursing homes, which the program covers. (Medicaid coverage for home health services varies from state to state.) This does not come cheap for the government, which pays about 60% of all long-term-care costs in the U.S.; only about 5% of Americans currently have private long-term-care insurance...
...these criticisms provides a window to understanding both the complexity of health care reform and why it's so ripe for mischaracterization. For instance, to prevent people from purchasing long-term-care coverage when they are already in need, the CLASS Act requires that enrollees be employed and pay into the system for five years before becoming eligible to collect benefits. But because the CBO evaluates the costs of legislation - like the Senate reform bill - based on 10-year periods, the CLASS Act - which would begin collecting premiums in 2011 but wouldn't begin payouts until 2016 - appears to generate...