Title: I DON'T GET IT!

Author:

Section/SPIG: Community Health Planning and Policy Development

Issue Date:

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by Tom Piper

Soaring health care costs are once again headline news:

- BIGGEST HIKE SINCE 1990
health care premiums for employer-sponsored plans hit 13.9% in 2003

- BABY BOOM GENERATION WILL BANKRUPT MEDICARE TRUST FUND
medical expenses from age 70 until death average $140,700 per person

- U.S. UNINSURE RATE ROSE TO 15.2% OF POPULATION IN 2002
up from 14.6% in 2001 totalling 43.6 million uninsured Americans

- HEALTHCARE COSTS SHIFTING TO GOVERNMENT
percentage of Americans who received health insurance through employers fell to 61.3 percent in 2002 from 62.6% in 2001, while government-sponsored insurance covered 25.7 percent of the U.S. population in 2002, up from 25.3 percent in 2001.

This is just a tip of the iceberg in trying to describe the growing crisis facing our country as a result of unchecked health care cost increases. Not only have dramatic increases in Medicaid and employee health insurance premiums helped bring state government budgets to their knees, but private business is reeling from health care costs that often far exceed the cost of materials for their products.

Policy-makers purport that health care providers must compete, but consumers don’t have the simpliest comparitive tools like price lists, quality indicators or payment choices. The purchaser of most health services is overwhelmingly the employer or government.

So, why are we allowing this to happen? I don’t get it . . . if this kind of escalation happened in food, or gasoline, or computers, or electricity, there would be a huge investigation, and we would have somebody’s head. We would scream: “I’m sick and tired of this, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

We have the most advanced health care system in the world, pay the most money for health care of anyone in the world, and we rank less than 25th in health care status in the world. Where is the accountability, integrity and value in this situation, let alone “caring attitude” that we tell the world that we are known for?

I don’t get it . . .