The True Costs of Health Care, and the Urgency to Pass Reform
Welcome to this installment of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. In keeping with our coverage of health care and health insurance reform, this week we'll take a look at one article that deals with larger issues in the debate, namely the cost, and why these costs are adding to a sense of urgency in the need to pass comprehensive health care and health insurance reform. Our article this week hits this very well. Entitled, "You Have No Idea What Health Costs: If You Did, You Might Just Want Real Reform," this comes to us from The Washington Post.
This article discusses the fact that many of us don't fully understand the full, burdensome costs of health care, which is why so many people are still resistant to reform. The author succinctly puts it this way, "Imagine if people who touched a hot stove felt only a small fraction of the pain from the burn. That's pretty much what's happening in our health-care system. It hurts enough that we would prefer it to stop, but the urgency is lost." This passage is in response to the results from the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2009 Employer Benefits Survey and the slowness of health care reform's passage.
According to this survey, the cost of health care coverage is $13,375 for the average family. This will increase to $30,083 in ten years according to the report, which is pretty staggering. This means that, over three years, the cost of health insurance will approach six figures, if not more. The author goes onto say, "Those are numbers to marvel at. Those are numbers to fear. But they are not the numbers that loom in the minds of most Americans. And therein lies the problem for health-care reform."
While the author says that most of us get insurance through our employers, which seems all well and good, many of us don't realize that paying for employer-based health care comes out of our wages. Sadly, the increases in health insurance coverage have overtaken any pay increases we've seen as a society. While health insurance costs have risen over 300 percent in the past thirty years, corporate salaries have risen only 200 percent. This means as time goes on, more and more will be taken out of our pockets for health insurance coverage.
The main problem besides this is that most reform isn't being showcased as big, sweeping reforms, but smaller, long-term changes to help make the health care industry more efficient and, therefore, more affordable to everyone in the long term. However, people in both parties have problems with certain provisions of the proposed health care reform bills, which make sense. Can't have opposing political parties if they agreed all the time, right?
However, the main problem seen by the author of this article is that we don't see the real urgency in the need for health care reform. Hopefully more articles like this will be written in order to inform the public of the need for reform in the face of crippling health care costs in the future. Only through public debate and compromise can true health care reform become a reality.
