Tag Archives: Transparency

The Wall Street Journal does not pretend to be on the center of anything.  They are a conservative big business newspaper but I still enjoy reading their stories.  Today there was a story titled “Why I’m Not Hiring When you add it all up, it costs $74,000 to put $44,000 in Sally’s pocket and to give her $12,000 in benefits.”

The story is about the added cost of health insurance for employers;

Employing Sally costs plenty too. My company has to write checks for $74,000 so Sally can receive her nominal $59,000 in base pay. Health insurance is a big, added cost: While Sally pays nearly $2,400 for coverage, my company pays the rest—$9,561 for employee/spouse medical and dental. We also provide company-paid life and other insurance premiums amounting to $153. Altogether, company-paid benefits add $9,714 to the cost of employing Sally.

Companies have also been pressed into serving as providers of health insurance. In a saner world, health insurance would be something that individuals buy for themselves and their families, just as they do with auto insurance. Now, adding to the insanity, there is ObamaCare.

Every year, we negotiate a renewal to our health coverage. This year, our provider demanded a 28% increase in premiums—for a lesser plan. This is in part a tax increase that the federal government has co-opted insurance providers to collect. We had never faced an increase anywhere near this large; in each of the last two years, the increase was under 10%.

Mr. Fleischer is president of Bogen Communications Inc. in Ramsey, N.J.. Now because of the power of the Internet we see this response from a Wall Street Journal reader;

Did anyone go on this guy’s web site? He has posted his financials. Take a look at them and tell me his problems are due to a couple thousand dollar per employee increase in employment cost.

His problems are elsewhere. For some inexplicable reason Mr. Fleisher allowed his expenses to increase by $15 million dollars in the face of a $ 10 million decrease in revenues. But he’s worried about what appears to be a$165 thousand increase in insurance costs and some administrative requirements that are easily handled at a clerical level and by very inexpensive automated payroll services. IIn short he’s got a problem that’s 150 times bigger than the insurance problem he is focused on.

He is oblivious to the fact the $3 million in dividends he paid last year might have been better used to finance future growth, or for improvements that might improve efficiency. He is oblivious to the fact that the $9 million he borrowed to finance his miscalculations in expense management will impede his ability o grow in the future. No, for Mr. Fleisher it’s all about government interference. His politics may make him feel better but they’re not going to help him dig himself out of the hole he’s n, and similar thoughts are not going to help you did your way out of yours.

This means that someone took the time to read the story, research the company and reply to the article which, at the time of writing this post, had over 700 responses. This is the power of the Internet.  The way for consumers to get at the truth and not believe media stories.  This is also the reason that pharma is having so many problems.

According to a story in Newsweek “Results from fully one third of the clinical trials of five classes of drugs never see the light of day, finds an analysis published in Annals of Internal Medicine. The drugs were anticholesteremics, antidepressants, antipsychotics, proton-pump inhibitors (which reduce gastric acid), and vasodilators (which relax blood-vessel walls in order to reduce blood pressure).

This story and the story in the WSJ are excellent examples of why transparency is NOT an option anymore.   Like Mark Twain said “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so”