Health Insurance More Costly than Rent in NYC, Spiraling Health Care Costs, & Being Shut out of COBRA

Welcome to another installment of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. This week we’ll be looking at three articles covering various, yet interesting topics regarding health insurance and health care. Our first article comes from the Associated Press and is entitled, “NYC health insurance costlier than rent.” In this article, they cite a recent analysis of data from the New York Post that gathered health insurance costs as well as the cost of rent for apartments in the downtown New York area. They found that the health insurance premium for a typical family was up to $4,354 per month, while a typical rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $3,947.

This is a staggering piece of information, and shows that costs of health insurance and health care are indeed getting out of hand. That’s roughly $9,000 a month just for rent and health insurance coverage. Who knows how much money that leaves for bills, food and so on for the traditional family? I certainly don’t, but I can’t imagine it would be a lot. This is one piece of information that shows that, despite what one thinks of reform, one thing that must be tackled are jaw-dropping costs such as these. Health insurance coverage has to be affordable, or people will give it up entirely, as we’ve seen from other stories.

In a somewhat related article from The New York Times entitled, “The Routine Spiral of Health Care Costs.” This article looks first at a personal story in which a minor medical procedure costs nearly $3,000, which seems somewhat ridiculous. This was essentially for an exam that took twenty minute to complete. This is from “unbundling” various portions of the procedure and charging for them individually, which seems to lead to a higher cost overall. It’s this type of thing that led medical expert Uwe E. Reinhardt of Princeton University to say the American health care system is “chaos behind a veil of secrecy.”

The article goes onto say that it’s not clear why health care costs are skyrocketing. However, because they are, sixty-one percent of working Americans are at risk for “not being financially able to retire” according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. These are just further examples of high health care costs seeming to spiral out of control, and further show that something must be done to bring them in line with other first-world nations, where in per-capita spending on health care is far less than our own.

Our final article comes from USA Today and is entitled, “People shut out of COBRA have few insurance options.” This article talks about people who are being denied COBRA coverage for various reasons, which is leading them to seek out costly individual health insurance policies, if they’re even eligible for them. This is causing a dire situation for many individuals who are losing their jobs for various reasons, and for whatever reason they aren’t eligible for COBRA, whether it be something their company did to make them ineligible, where they live, or various state laws that make it more difficult to become eligible.

The article gives some tips for those who are ineligible, such as getting covered under a spouse’s plan, or seeing if their children qualify for various state-based Children’s Health Insurance Programs, or CHIP for short. Pursuing these options can guarantee at least coverage for part of your family, if not all of it.

Overall, these articles showcase the growing need for some kind of reform to take place, whether it’s government-controlled health care or something else. Lowering the costs of health care and health insurance need to be a priority for our future, because if these costs keep skyrocketing as they are, it will be impossible for all but the richest of us to get quality health care at all. Hopefully that won’t happen, but only time will tell. Until next time, have a happy and healthy day.