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As Health Care Costs Skyrocket, Wages Fall, We’re Cutting Back on Needed Care |
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Workers are paying higher premiums, deductibles and co-pays for employer-sponsored health care this year than in 2007, continuing a trend that since 1999 has seen premiums more than double, while wages fall further behind, two new studies document.
Also, these higher health care costs and the staggering economy are forcing families to go without needed prescriptions, preventive care, tests and doctors’ visits, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, as we pointed out Monday, Sen. John McCain’s answer to the health care crisis is to unleash the health care industry—just as Bush, with McCain’s backing, did with the banking and financial industries. Today, U.S. taxpayers are on the verge of spending $700 billion to bail out that failure.
Studies show that McCain’s other proposals, including taxing your employer-based health care benefits, could mean 20 million or more of us lose our health care coverage.
First, let’s look at the new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KKF) and Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET).
According the report, Employer Health Benefits 2008, premiums for employer-sponsored health benefits are up 5 percent, to $12,680 over 2007. On average, workers are paying $3,354 this year in premiums to cover their share of the cost. The study also notes that while premiums have more than doubled since 1999, wages have risen 34 percent—and inflation by 29 percent.
In 2008, 18 percent of all workers have at least $1,000 deductibles, compared with 12 percent last year. But the percentage of workers in smaller firms (under 200 employees) paying $1,000 before the insurance kicks in, rose from 21 percent in 2007, to 35 percent this year.
While the report called the premium increase “modest,” compared with recent years when premium rose as much as 13.9 percent annually, HRET interim President John Combs, M.D., says:
Even modest growth in premiums and deductibles can result in financial challenges for many working families, particularly when coupled with high food and gas prices in 2008.
Kaiser President and CEO Drew Altman puts it this way:
With rising deductibles, more and more people face a substantial amount out-of-pocket for their health care before their insurance fully kicks in. Health insurance is steadily becoming less comprehensive, and it’s no wonder that in today’s tough economic climate, many families count health care costs as one of their top pocketbook issues.
Meanwhile, Premiums Versus Paychecks, a new state-by-state report from Families USA, says that since 2000,
health care costs have skyrocketed, while working families’ wages have stood still. Other factors have also threatened families’ economic well-being, including rising gasoline prices and the downturn in the housing market, but the confluence of stagnant wages and rising health care costs have become a significant strain on family budgets.
In the coming weeks, Families USA will release state-specific reports on health care costs and wages from 2000 to 2007. Here’s a sample of some of the reports released so far.
- Ohio: Health care premiums rose 76.4 percent and wages 8.94 percent.
- Pennsylvania: Health care premiums rose 86.2 percent and wages 13.4 percent.
- Wisconsin: Health care premiums rose 73.9 percent and wages 15.5 percent.
- Minnesota: Health care premiums rose 73.8 percent and wages 17.1 percent.
Julia Eisman at Families USA’s Stand Up for Health Care blog writes:
The economic downturn coupled with ever-rising health care costs has had serious consequences for many of us, but unlike the financial sector, working Americans can’t expect a government bailout. Instead, more individuals are incurring oppressive medical debt (more than half of bankruptcies are now due, at least in part, to problems with medical costs) and many Americans have joined the ranks of the underinsured and uninsured.
Faced with rising health care costs, working families are filling few prescriptions, postponing important tests and making other health care cuts, The Wall Street Journal reports.
In the first two quarters of this year, the number of prescriptions filled, compared with the previous year, fell for the first time in a decade. In addition, the Journal article notes:
Despite an aging and growing U.S. population, the number of physician office visits also has been declining since the end of 2006.
In a survey by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners last month, 22 percent of 686 consumers said that economy-related woes were causing them to go to the doctor less often. About 11 percent said they’ve scaled back on prescription drugs to save money. Some of the areas being hit include hip and knee replacements, mammograms, and visits to the emergency room, according to a survey conducted by D2Hawkeye Inc., a medical data analytics firm.
Experts warn cutting back on vital health care now can be costlier, dangerous or even deadly in the long run.
As more people forgo screenings or wait until minor medical problems blow up into serious complications, hospital and emergency-room admissions could eventually spike.
“Once you’ve had that heart attack and end up in the hospital, that’s when the expensive stuff begins,” says Dana Goldman, director of health economics at the Rand Corp., a nonprofit research institute in Santa Monica, Calif.
One way to address the health care crisis is through Sen. Barack Obama’s plan that would let families keep their existing health care coverage if they are satisfied with it. His plan also offers other options that include letting individuals who don’t have coverage at work and small businesses join cost-effective large insurance pools. By extending coverage to more people, encouraging preventive care and updating health care technology, Obama’s plan would lower costs for working families. Lower health care costs will take a lot of pressure off families getting squeezed in this economy.
McCain’s approach would result in millions of America’s workers losing health care coverage. As our Seth Michaels pointed out earlier this week:
The consequences of McCain’s health care plan would mean that while millions of working families would be paying a new tax on their health benefits, millions more would be dropped from their existing coverage entirely. Families would be left with no health care coverage, facing an insurance industry unregulated and all too willing to offer confusing, expensive policies that offer inadequate, expensive coverage.
Click here to read the full run down of McCain’s plan.
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Doctors to candidates: enact single-payer health reform
Over 5,000 U.S. physicians have signed an open letter calling on the candidates for president and Congress “to stand up for the health of the American people and implement a nonprofit, single-payer national health insurance system.”
Noting that the nation’s private-insurance-based model is failing by denying needed medical care to millions, wasting resources and driving up costs, the doctors say that a publicly financed system is “the sole hope for affordable, comprehensive coverage.”
“A single-payer health system could realize administrative savings of more than $300 billion annually — enough to cover the uninsured and to eliminate co-payments and deductibles for all Americans,” they write, adding that it would also slow cost increases.
Dr. Oliver Fein, a professor of clinical medicine and public health at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and a signer of the letter, said today, “With the sudden economic downturn, more people than ever before are worried about how to pay for health care. A single-payer system — an improved Medicare for all — would lift those worries, provide care to all who need it and require no new money. It’s the only morally and fiscally responsible approach to take.”
In their letter, the physicians express disappointment that most U.S. political leaders still cling to the private health insurance industry model of financing care and “seem intent on reprising failed schemes from the past” like mandates or tax incentives.
“The incremental changes suggested by most Democrats cannot solve our problems; further pursuit of market-based strategies, as advocated by Republicans, will exacerbate them,” they say. “What needs to be changed is the system itself.”
The letter is being circulated by Physicians for a National Health Program, a single-payer advocacy group. Fein is the group’s president-elect. Excerpts from the appeal are being published in full-page advertisements in the Oct. 13 editions of The New Yorker and The Nation magazines, which arrive on newsstands this week.
Signers of the letter include some of the most prominent figures in U.S. medicine, including leaders of professional societies in internal medicine, pediatrics, family medicine, psychiatry and public health. Among them are Marcia Angell, M.D., senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School and past editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, and Bernard Lown, M.D., professor of cardiology emeritus at Harvard and Nobel laureate.
Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the letter, said, “Physicians have a responsibility to get to the root of a patient’s medical complaint, to make a diagnosis based on evidence. Only then can we confidently prescribe a cure, rather than offer a consoling placebo.
“Given the repeated failure of incremental reforms like the one under way in Massachusetts, which is already facing cost overruns and leaving many residents uncovered, and given the increasingly obvious failure of unfettered markets, it’s clear that neither of these traditional prescriptions for reform will work,” she said. “What’s needed instead is the only treatment that has proven its effectiveness — a single-payer plan.”
The letter’s release follows a survey in the Annals of Internal Medicine this spring that shows 59 percent of U.S. physicians support national health insurance, a jump of 10 percentage points from five years ago
Single-payer plans typically involve a single, publicly administered social insurance fund that guarantees health care coverage for everyone, much like Medicare presently does for seniors. Patients go the doctors and hospitals of their choice; health care providers largely remain private. Private health insurers are eliminated or their role is substantially reduced.
A bill in Congress, the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, H.R. 676, embodies the single-payer model. Sponsored by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), it currently has over 90 co-sponsors, more than any other health reform proposal.
The ads in The New Yorker and The Nation announcing the physicians’ open letter feature Nicole Hollander’s cartoon character Sylvia writing a letter to Congress.
The full text and initiating signers of the “Open Letter to the Candidates on Single Payer Health Reform” are available at http://www.pnhp.org/letter/.
The complete list of signers is available at http://www.pnhp.org/letter/signers/.
A PDF of the full-page, four-color ad that is appearing in the pages of The New Yorker and The Nation can be found at http://www.pnhp.org/ad.
Physicians for a National Health Program, a membership organization of over 15,000 physicians, supports a single-payer national health insurance program. To contact a physician-spokesperson in your area, call (312) 782-6006 or visit http://www.pnhp.org/stateactions.
If Congress can bail out the Wall St. fat cats, then they surely can afford to bail out the uninsured, the underinsured, the sick & needy.
Afterall, isn’t that the Christian way? WWJBO
Who Would Jesus Bail Out?