A word of warning: this article could adversely affect your health. It all depends on how sticker shock affects your system.
The following is Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's testimony before the House Budget Committee on Wednesday:
Chrysler Group is set to join its Detroit-based rivals in the breakdown lane of the nation's auto industry, expected to announce about 10,000 job cuts and some assembly line closings Wednesday - just a year after it was racing past competitors in most measures of success.
Chrysler Group is set to join its Detroit-based rivals in the breakdown lane of the nation's auto industry, just a year after it was racing past those competitors in most measures of success.
In a partnership of unlikely allies, Wal-Mart's CEO, other corporate leaders and the head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) called Wednesday for universal health care coverage for all Americans by 2012.
President Bush in his State of the Union address Tuesday laid out a plan intended to make healthcare more affordable, give everyone who buys insurance the same tax break and incentivize you to be more cost-conscious in how you spend your healthcare dollars.
Just when you thought Washington politics couldn't get any weirder: now George W. Bush wants to tax the rich.
Top executives from General Motors, Ford and Chrysler got their meeting with President Bush Tuesday, and while they left saying they were pleased by the talks, they also left without any firm pledges of help from the administration.
Even if you're in perfect health now, just thinking about the cost of medical care is bound to make you feel a little ill. With the price of everything from hospital visits to prescription drugs up...
If you are covered by an employer-sponsored health plan, chances are you'll have a high-deductible plan linked to a health savings account to consider this year - along with the usual array of HMOs, PPOs and point of service plans. It may be a tempting choice, but when it comes to health insurance, the cheaper option often has hidden costs.
Health insurance premiums this year rose 7.7 percent, the lowest growth rate in six years but still more than double the growth rate in inflation and worker earnings, according to the latest survey from Kaiser Family Foundation.
Chrysler Group is running into trouble gaining the same concessions from the United Auto Workers union on health care coverage that the union has already granted rivals General Motors and Ford Motor, according to a published report.
Despite prompting from two Democrats, General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner stopped short Thursday of asking Congress to take a broad-based reform of the health care system.
Life should not be so frustrating for small-business owners who want to offer health insurance to their workers. While big corporations can choose among eager insurers, a small-business owner may b...
Rising gas prices and health care costs have cut into the retirement savings efforts American households, according to a report released Thursday.
My request for a "better idea" on immigration ("Let's Get Real on the Immigration Problem") generated a lot of responses, a sampling of which are reproduced below.
An average couple retiring this year will need $200,000 to cover their healthcare costs for 20 years in retirement, not including the expense of long-term care should they need it.
New York (CNN/Money) - Who's going to help take care of your health next year?
General Motors Corp. slashed its dividend and cut the pay of CEO Rick Wagoner and other top officers Tuesday, and announced moves to cut retirement and health costs for nonunion workers.
Following the roughest year of his presidency, President Bush on Tuesday evening used his State of the Union address to reiterate some of his key economic proposals: making tax-cuts permanent and making healthcare coverage more affordable and portable.
President Bush will propose new tax breaks for personal health spending during his State of the Union address next week, a newspaper reported Wednesday.
These days the classic New Year's get-healthy resolution -- shed those extra 10 pounds, kick the nicotine habit, dust off the old gym membership card -- has been joined by a new one: Lower those out-of-pocket health-care costs.
The former chairman of the company formerly known as AOL Time Warner is sitting back on a tan leather couch in his Washington, D.C., office, looking happy and relaxed. I'm here to talk to Steve Cas...
Who's going to help take care of your health next year?
General Motors Corp. confirmed Wednesday evening that the Securities and Exchange Commission has subpoenaed records from it about its accounting practices, creating further headaches for the already embattled automaker.
General Motors Corp. announced an agreement Monday with the United Auto Workers union that the troubled automaker says will save billions in health care costs.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (CNN/Money) - When you work for a company, your employer typically foots a large portion, if not all of your health insurance premiums. That money, which is not reported on your W2, is tax-free to you.
The chances that General Motors will file for bankruptcy are now about 30 percent, according to one industry analyst, following the bankruptcy filing by the company's former parts unit, Delphi.
General Motors Corp. and the United Auto Workers appear to be nearing a deal to trim about $1 billion annually off the nearly $6 billion the auto manufacturer is expected to spend this year on health-care costs, according to a published report.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The good news: The growth rate in the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance plan premiums declined for the second year in a row and ended four consecutive years of double-digit growth rates.
New research has dashed the "myth" that immigrants place a major burden on America's healthcare system, according to a news report.
The Bush administration agreed Wednesday to ask Congress for more money to meet veterans' health care expenses after disclosing last week a politically embarrassing $1 billion shortfall in the program.
General Motors Corp. is set to take unilateral action to reduce its health care expenses if it doesn't get concessions from the United Auto Workers union by the end of the month, according to a published report.
Leaders of United Auto Workers union locals gave the green light to concession talks with General Motors Corp., according to a published report, although the union leadership vowed it will only grant relief that does not require a reopening of the current labor contract.
WHAT DO GENERAL MOTORS' WOES, the Medicare prescription-drug law, the state and local health-care time bomb described in the previous story, and Congress's recent refusal to trim soaring state Medi...
IT'S EASY TO IMAGINE THAT THE retiree health-care crunch doesn't really apply to you. That your pocketbook is somehow impervious to the demographic reality of millions of prescription-pill-popping,...
Chrysler Group has won changes from the United Auto Workers union that will save it tens of millions of dollars in health costs, while costing employees and their family up to $1,000 in health care deductibles, according to a published report.
Are companies getting more intrusive in dictating private behaviors?
For Pamela Badgerow Adams, 53, and her husband Normer, 54, the past two years have been a medical nightmare. A rare intestinal ailment sent their elder son to the hospital, their younger son was ho...
Most Americans got their first hint of the future of the U.S. health-care system during President Bush's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention—but they had to listen very closely....
SO AT LAST THE ELECTION IS A LITTLE MORE ABOUT THE economy than it used to be. Voters have been telling pollsters for months that the economy is their No. 1 concern, but media chatterers don't want...
The first in a series of MONEY/ICR polls of the so-called 'investor class' -- the roughly half of American households who own investments and are already being courted by both parties as an emerging political force -- finds that investors say Democratic candidate John Kerry (with 41 percent) would be a better manager of the U.S. economy over the next four years than George Bush (with 40 percent).
Health insurance costs are going up, and up, and up. And in some cases, up some more.
Though Newt Gingrich and his Contract With America led Republicans ten years ago to a historic takeover of Congress, the mastermind behind the conservative ascendancy will not speak at the GOP conv...
President Bush and John Kerry wake up in their own beds today, in Crawford and on Beacon Hill.
With no cure in sight for soaring medical costs, big businesses have officially declared our health-care system DOA. GE, AT&T, and more than 100 other organizations affiliated with the National Coa...
Washington is aflutter over charges that the White House may have covered up the true cost of the prescription drug bill. But whoever may have told Medicare's actuary not to share what with whom, t...
The trust fund that supports hospital benefits for the nation's elderly, under the federal Medicare program, will become insolvent in 2019, seven years earlier than had been predicted, according to the annual report of trustees of the Social Security and Medicare programs.
Your schedule is being hijacked by holiday dinners, back-to-back school pageants, road trips to visit relatives and, of course, shopping, shopping, shopping. Who has time for financial planning?
Year after year of double-digit insurance-premium hikes have some small businesses fearing for their health. Some have stopped providing health insurance. But an increasing number are offering "con...
Rising health-care costs are putting the squeeze on everybody--well, almost everybody. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, health-plan premiums are up nearly 14% this year, and deductibles a...
Your schedule is being hijacked by holiday dinners, back-to-back school pageants, road trips to visit relatives and, of course, shopping, shopping, shopping. Who has time for financial planning? Bu...
When Ed Baltram retired in 2001 after more than 30 years as a manager at Lucent Technologies, paying for health care was the least of his worries. But then Lucent announced in September that it was...
As we head into the latter half of this pre-election year, you'd expect the air to be filled with sweeping Democratic plans for reinvigorating the still-stalled economy. Instead, the primary candid...
We'll go out on a limb and make the following assumption: It has been a while since you took stock of your financial well-being. We understand. Closing your eyes to how badly your various brokerage...
After 26 years with steel giant LTV, Betty Boyce was ready to have fun. From her retirement income, she budgeted $600 a month for winter skiing, summer golfing, three-day-a-week workouts and salsa ...
The death of Kjeston "Michelle" Rodgers was, by all accounts, an accident. The 40-year-old single mother of three daughters was walking in a dimly lit area outside a General Electric plant in Louis...
Not long ago, the stock market reigned supreme, CEOs were worshiped like baseball heroes, and Sept. 11 was just another day on the calendar. In those heady times, employers creatively enhanced thei...
Early mariners had a way with a phrase. "All souls on board" meant a full ship of passengers, ready to set sail. Similarly, consultants to the health-care industry often describe the size of an ins...
A weird but true fact about modern medical insurance: The healthiest way to deal with a managed-care company is to own stock in it. If you're covered by a medical benefits plan and actually go to t...
Jerry Shay, president of KME America, is on the front lines of small business' fight against rising medical costs. Over the past three years he has watched the health insurance premiums at his 11-p...
As if war anxieties and recession worries weren't enough, now small businesses have to contend with higher health insurance costs. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study found that in 2001 the ave...
This fall, the annual ritual of picking a health plan will be more challenging than ever. Set aside, for a moment, people's heightened sense of financial vulnerability since September's attacks on ...
Recently my father-in-law entered a hospital for treatment of a serious illness. To ensure his constant care, our family arranged for a 24-hour-a-day health-care aide, whose salary was not covered ...
For David Titcomb, buying health insurance is a bit like buying a candy bar. Over time the price keeps rising and the bar keeps shrinking. As the president of Titcomb Associates, a land-surveying f...
Desperate to get a piece of the rapidly growing, increasingly healthy 65-and-over population, health maintenance organizations are selling themselves to the nation's estimated 38 million Medicare r...
If you ever want to get the fur flying in a roomful of policy wonks, ask them whether the tax burden in the United States is excessive. Absolutely! the opponents of big government will roar, includ...
Early retirees are increasingly getting stuck for the cost of their health coverage as part of corporate downsizing. For instance, Unisys, the information management company with headquarters in Bl...
Deep in the Louisiana bayou, a team of leathery pipeline workers--of all people--celebrate the rigors of healthy living. A few years ago the 14 men who operate a 22-acre natural gas platform in the...
MEDICAL INFLATION LIVES
With the exception of raising the 24 cents-a-pack cigarette tax, Congress has so far avoided proposing in-your-face tax hikes to pay for health reform. But don't be fooled. Lawmakers are lining up ...
IF YOU'VE tuned out the unending complexities of health care reform -- if you can't even recall what's bothering Harry and Louise, and by the way, are they still married? -- it's okay. Though Clint...
BILL CLINTON'S ambitious 1,342-page health care reform bill has yet to clear its first congressional committee. But Washington insiders have already delivered this four-letter prognosis: D-E-A-D. T...
Put checks in the boxes and fax your answers to us at 212-522-0119, or mail them to Money Health-Care Poll, Room 32-38, Time & Life Building, Rockefeller Center, New York, N.Y. 10020.
GET READY FOR a pleasant shock: Runaway medical care spending has decelerated to a brisk walk. It could be down to a saunter in the next few years and might even stop and rest a bit -- without the ...
LOST IN THE BABBLE over health care reform are two fearsome facts that many companies are just beginning to discern -- and that have them sweating. First, President Clinton's plan would shift respo...
HEALTH maintenance organizations take a startlingly sensible approach to cutting health care costs: Keep people well. Yet the very idea of joining one makes a lot of people sick. Why? HMOs provide ...
IT'S 2005 and the impossible is happening. For the fifth straight year America's health care outlays are declining as a percent of GDP. That's not so amazing, since most people are now enrolled in ...
Although more than 80% of the nearly 10,000 readers who responded to MONEY's February poll on health care think the treatment they receive personally is good or excellent, a full 51% believe the co...
Get ready for Act II of Clintonomics -- the First Lady's task force on health care. A key question: Will Hillary emulate Hammurabi, the Babylonian ruler who slapped on history's first-recorded pric...
Will Bill and Hillary get control of health care costs? As we punch away at the keyboard, that is the question pulsating in the Beltway beau monde. Back here in the real world -- the everyday world...
Scalpels are poised to start operating on the nation's $839 billion health- care system. Although there is no consensus yet on where the knife should fall, it appears increasingly likely that you'l...
EPOCHAL EVENTS often go unnoticed at the time they occur. The morning after the Wright brothers proved that heavier-than-air machines can stay aloft, no metropolitan dailies proclaimed MAN FLIES in...
Soaring health costs and corporate layoffs are connected, says Dan Lacey, editor of the Workplace Trends newsletter and author of four books on work in the U.S. You won't hear companies talk about ...
WHAT'S WRONG with U.S. health care? Angry voters and anxious politicians in this presidential election year are fingering two villains -- costs that won't stop climbing and an insurance system that...
THE BATTLE over benefits has grabbed a starring role in the corporate drama of the 1990s. Companies gasping for profits in a sluggish economy are no longer willing to bear giant, fast-growing expen...
OUR roundtable discussion with five health-care authorities echoed reader suggestions about how medical costs could be reduced and provided several tips on how you can be a smarter, more aggressive...
No longer content to be the passive paymasters of America's ever more expensive private health care system, corporate executives are going on the attack. Their new remedy: managed-care networks. Un...
WHAT'S the biggest cost problem for American business between now and the year 2000? As you might guess, 63% of the chief executives recently polled by FORTUNE say that runaway medical bills are on...
How many Ninja Turtle action toys does it take to pay for an appendectomy? Answer: 39,000, at least if you're Dayton Hudson. Kenneth Macke, CEO of the Minneapolis retailer, told the Senate Finance ...
When John Morey learned that health insurance costs for his 40-person electronics firm would shoot up 50% last year, he didn't get mad, he got even. He started by scrapping the traditional medical ...
Time was when following a career path was like climbing a ladder. Rung by rung, you ascended in a succession of orderly steps, each one with added responsibility, pay, status and, you hoped, satisf...
IF YOU THINK your company's medical costs are off the fever charts, listen to Harry Featherstone. He's president and CEO of Will-Burt, an Orrville, Ohio, fabricator of automotive parts that employs...
WHAT ARE NOW EQUAL to half of all pretax profits and rising fast? Answer: company health benefits. No wonder managers are desperate. And no wonder many of them are marveling at a plan adopted by on...
For an idea of your employer-paid health insurance coverage in retirement, consider what it is now. Chances are your company has been tinkering with your medical benefits lately, adding an option h...
Imagine this. You get a note one day from the Internal Revenue Service saying the agency feels bad that it's been taxing you on money you need to pay for such basic expenses as health insurance ded...
Have you been tempted to join your company's health maintenance organization (HMO) for its low cost but feel uncomfortable about giving up visits to your family doctor or to the top specialist in t...
IMAGINE A RECENT FORTUNE 500 retiree named Fred, a prince of an employee over the years, but right now a corporate horror. Fred, 60, is covered by his company's health plan and has a life expectanc...
AMERICA'S TOP CEOs view rocketing health care costs as a drain on profits and a threat to the very competitiveness of U.S. industry. Health care consumes more than 11% of GNP -- twice the bite it t...
In case you missed it, health insurance premiums went up this year -- way up. ''The increases range from 15% to 25%, with some going as high as 50%,'' says Robert Waldron of the Health Insurance As...
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