The Pioneer Times

Issue date: 4/28/08 Section: Healthcare

Media Credit: Google Images

The New Jersey Assembly and Senate legislators continue to revise a bill that will cut the number of tax board members in all N.J. In effect, this will eliminate health and pension benefits for future tax board members.

It is one of the steps that Gov. Jon S. Corzine wants to take to reduce the state budget.

One choice to improve the New Jersey budget is to reduce, by thousands, the number of state workers and cut services that were not legally mandatory, said Corzine in his recent presentation of the Fiscal Budget. For the past two decades, he said, the state provided employee benefits enhancements that have cost the state an unfunded liability on pension system of approximately $20 billion and an unfunded healthcare liability of nearly $80 billion.

State Sen. Joseph Vitale, Chair of Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee, last week presented, a proposal to the Senate to expand N.J. Family Care. This establishes mandate health care coverage for children, and makes various reforms to individual and small employer insurance markets.

Health care is defined as all the goods and services that promotes health and prevents, treats, and manages illness, physical and mental well being. An organization that provides such services constitutes a health care system, which can be a combination of private and public health system.

The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not provide universal health care. The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked the U.S. Health care System 72nd among 191 member nations in the study. Americans have lower life expectancy than other industrialized countries with universal health care, that aims to extend access to health care as widely as possible to all citizen and residents of a country.

According to the Commonwealth Fund, America spends a higher percentage of GDP than any other country in health care, but has worse ratings in quality, efficiency, access, safe, and equity care.

A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2007 shows that premiums for family coverage increased 78 percent, The inflation 17 percent, while wages have risen only 19 percent.

New Jersey Health Insurance includes employer-based groups (generally HMOs) and three other types of programs: Individual Health Coverage Program, Small Employer Health Benefits Program, and the New Jersey Health Access Program.

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