Breaking: Senate Set to Vote on Republican Budget Shortly
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Breaking News: Manny Herrmann, AFL-CIO online mobilization coordinator, sends the following.
According to The National Journal, the Senate is expected to vote today on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget that not only permanently extends the Bush tax cuts—but gives even more tax cuts to Wall Street and the wealthy—and pays for them by slashing services for seniors, children and low- and middle-income working families.
The House Republican budget bill would destroy Medicare as we know it and replace it with underfunded vouchers—a dangerous move even former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich called “right-wing social engineering.” When Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) announced he’d vote “no,” on the Ryan budget, he pointed out his fear that “as health [care] inflation rises, the cost of private plans will outgrow the government premium support—and the elderly will be forced to pay ever higher deductibles and co-pays.”
It’s important to note that Ryan’s tea party-inspired budget bill isn’t a deficit-reduction plan—it’s Robin Hood in reverse. While it includes $4.3 trillion in deep budget cuts—perhaps the most wrenching in our nation’s history—it almost completely cancels out these harsh cuts with $4.2 trillion in tax giveaways that disproportionately benefit America’s top earners.
Greed, Not Need, Drives Health Insurance Costs Up
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As members of Congress continue to debate health care reform, they should read a new report that shows insurance companies have nearly doubled the cost of premiums over the past eight years. That’s twice the rate of medical inflation and more than three times faster than wages in the same time period.
The report from Health Care for America Now (HCAN) sets the record straight on insurance industry claims that huge increases in premiums are the result of rising health care costs driven by doctors and hospitals. HCAN is a national grassroots campaign of more than 1,000 organizations in 46 states representing 30 million people dedicated to winning quality, affordable health care.
Richard Kirsch, HCAN’s national campaign director, said during a recent press conference call that insurance premiums went up 97 percent for families and 90 percent for individuals from 2000 to 2008. Underlying medical inflation, calculated from the Consumer Price Index, went up only 39 percent.
Health Costs Take Historic Chunk of Economy in Biggest-Ever Jump
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Earlier this week, we noted a new study that predicts health insurance premiums will jump between 10 percent and 11 percent this year. Now a new government report says health care costs last year took the biggest bite ever out of the nation’s economy.
The non-partisan Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reports that health care spending ate up a record 17.3 percent of the nation’s economy, or $2.5 trillion, in 2009, up from 16.2 percent in 2008. That is the largest one-year jump in 50 years. In 1960, health care costs consumed just 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
Over the past 50 years, as health care costs have soared and working families pay more and more for less and less, profits have skyrocketed in the health care industry, especially the private health insurance industry.
Republican Health Care Stall Means Higher Health Costs
The longer that congressional Republicans roadblock health care reform, the more it is going cost the American people–and the bigger the bite health care costs will take out of a reeling economy.
A new poll by Buck Consultants shows that costs for all type of plans–from PPO’s to high deductible plans–will jump by 10 percent to 11 percent this year. As the health care blog, Health Populi writes:
The double-digit cost increases that Buck Consultants expect are over twice the rate of general inflation in the U.S. expected in 2010. Thus, the marketplace isn’t nearly moderating health costs on its own without the influence of health reform.
Buck Consultant’s 21st National Health Care Trend Survey was conducted among 108 insurance organizations in the second half of 2009. Plans included Aetna, CIGNA, Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans, Kaiser Permanente, United HealthCare, and other plans. The plans surveyed represent 78.2 million covered consumers.
Government Already Runs Health Care for Millions of Americans
Some people say they don’t want health care reform because they don’t want the government involved. Or—shiver me timbers and pass the Socialist smelling salts—they don’t want a “government-run health care system.”
Here’s news for them: The private health care system in the United States is so bad that more people already are getting their health care from the government because they can’t get it in the private sector.
This from that most Communist of daily newspapers, the Wall Street Journal:
More people are getting their health insurance from the government as the number of individuals with coverage from an employer declines…
The number of people in the U.S. without health insurance rose by about 700,000 between 2007 and 2008 to 46.3 million. The proportion of uninsured was essentially unchanged at 15.4 percent.
An additional 4.4 million people in the U.S. were insured by the government as of 2008, for a total of 87.4 million, or 29 percent of the population, up from 27.8 percent in 2007. At the same time, 1.1 million fewer people had coverage from an employer in 2008, leaving 176.3 million people with such coverage.
