With health insurance premiums eating up ever more of her flat paycheck, Ms. Yapalater, a customer relations specialist for a small Long Island company, recently decided to forgo physical therapy for an injury sustained during Hurricane Sandy because of high out-of-pocket expenses.
Getting just a $100 raise would mean no subsidy and $6,653 of premiums, eating their raise and then some.
In 2009, total health care costs increased to 17.3percentt of GDP, with escalating premiums eating into both corporate profits and worker take home pay.
Perhaps because they've seen how obesity has caused so many problems for Gen X and the Baby Boomers, Millennials put a premium on eating right and overall health.
Health care spending per person, adjusted for inflation, has roughly doubled since 1988, to about $8,500 — pushing up health insurance premiums and eating into workers' wages.
David P. Sloane, director of government relations at AARP, the big lobby for older Americans, said increases in Medicare premiums were "eating away at the cost-of-living adjustment" made each year in Social Security checks.
Paying a premium to eat a cone of pizza in the nucleus of touristdom makes even the most confident native feel like a chump.
But for many elderly and middle-aged Japanese, the whale is embedded in their taste buds, if not their psyches, and they are willing to pay a premium to eat it.
The premiums may eat into the firm's margins, but not enough, at least not yet, for it to raise the commissions it charges.Judging by Airbnb's growth spurt, the damage to the firm's reputation was not irreversible.
Unfortunately, there are lots of low-income households for which the newly mandated premiums could eat up as much as a half of after-tax income, which hardly seems fair.
