Shouldn't We Be Smarter Than This?

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Please join me in getting depressed reading about the new Kaiser Foundation survey on health care costs.

Since 2001, the annual employee payment for health insurance has increased by 78 percent, compared with a wage increase of 19 percent and an inflation rate of 17 percent. In my case, if I take 'advantage' of the health insurance offered through my employer my 25 percent of the total premium will cost me roughly $3800 a year. On top of that there are $20 copays every time someone in my family visits a doctor and at least $10 every time a prescription is filled but only if the drug is on the lowest of three pricing tiers.

If all that isn't bad enough the obvious conclusion is that health insurance is quickly becoming too expensive for small and medium businesses. This means fewer employers are able to pick up the tab today than they were six years ago. (In case you didn't know, most employers pay 75% of the total cost, or in my employer's case roughly $10,000 a year per employee. We have over 150 employees, you do the math).

When do we finally get to the point where we decide that enough is enough and start forcing our elected representatives to take notice and change the laws that govern how health care is funded?

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that as costs continue to increase, and more and more workers lose insurance coverage because their employers no longer can afford to offer it, that the bulk of those paying for insurance today will be the uninsured tomorrow.

Who picks up the cost for the growing uninsured? Federal and state governments in large part, as well as you, me and everyone else who presently has insurance. We pay higher premiums and get squeezed more and more, even as health care continues to be delivered to those without insurance; their numbers are clearly growing.

What's the answer? It's pretty simple. The answer is to get us out of having to "pay for health care" through an insurance premium and create a new requirement that we pay for medical care via dedicated taxes. It's not so radical because to a very large extent, we're already doing that (i.e Medicare, Medicaid, SHIPS, etc.), but today the true costs are hidden from us.

In sum, let us all join the uninsured and get away from an ever-increasing cost structure based upon insurance, one that sooner or later is going to collapse from its own excess. After all, the only parties benefiting from the current system are health insurers and their investors even while the true costs are not paid for by everyone in the system.