If only you knew how much health care really cost!
Everyone gripes about how much health care costs, but in the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz argues that no one really has any idea.
Most people would be surprised, for instance, to learn that three years of slightly above-average coverage for the average family would cost more than six figures. Or that coverage for an average family costs $13,375. The problem, Kurtz says, is that 160 million Americans get insurance through their employers, and their employers pick up about 73 percent of the tab.
That sounds great, but in reality, those costs come out of wages. Not only that, but average wage increases in the last few years have been dwarfed by increases in health care costs. Workers are losing out both before and after they get their paychecks, in the form of higher insurance costs for their employers and higher premiums and co-pays for themselves. But the employer-based setup insulates people from recognizing the true cost of their care, making them relatively satisfied with their coverage and hostile to system-wide change.
The point is brought home in a Sacramento Bee article last Friday:
As medical bills spiral upward, the refrain is ever more common: Health care is costing an arm and a leg. But how much does that broken arm or that shattered leg cost?
Greg Davis, whose son Jonathan fractured his right leg during football practice, confesses to having little interest in finding out.
"Until it hits my pocket, I'm really not concerned about it," said Davis, an MRI supervisor at UC Davis Medical Center. "As far as I'm concerned, my son's broken leg is costing $65: the $50 emergency room co-pay and the $15 for an office visit.
The actual cost: $7,415 --$2,845 for the six-hour emergency room visit, $4,366 for X-rays and other radiology services, and $204 for a splint.
Could you afford that without insurance? And if your employer was forced to drop coverage because it was too costly?
According to the National Coalition on Health Care, the cost of health care is expected to grow to $2.5 trillion this year. That's nearly double the $1.4 trillion the government estimated was spent on health care in 2000, which was already twice the $714 billion recorded just 10 years earlier.
By 2018, the nation's tab for health care is expected to surge to $4.4 trillion.
How many employers will be able to stay in business and provide benefits for something that costs that much? Health care benefits could well go the way pension benefits. That's already begun to happen.
What will you do then?
My prediction: That's when we'll do something about health care, or as Greg Davis, "until it hits my pocket."
One reason it has taken so long for the conservatives to get their political act together to fight the socialist is that we are not people that need big groups to take care of situations. We take care of our families, we have jobs, we have insurance, we have homes that we can afford, we save for rainy days and retirement... Liberals, on the other hand, are used to depending on social, taxpayer funded organizations to fill their empty hands with OUR money. There are unions, and "ACORNS", and we conservatives have taken awhile to get our act together to start to fight back and stop the socialist.... but we are doing it.
This is an angry man. It's understandable. There's plenty to be angry about. The problem isn't the anger; it's where the blame is being placed.
You don't want the government to deliver socialized medicine? You're already getting socialized medicine. It's just coming from your employer. Most of us don't do a damn thing when it comes to health care. We get a job with benefits and we say that's one less thing to worry about. We're basically saying that's one less thing I don't have to be responsible for, despite the reader's claim that "we are not people that need big groups to take care of situations."
Yes you are. You… we… us… we like our health care because for most of us, it rarely hits our pockets; we're rarely forced to think about it. Those "liberals, on the other hand, are used to depending on social, taxpayer funded organizations to fill their empty hands with OUR money" are also the conservatives depending on someone else --their employer in this case-- to provide them with their health care?
If you're not the one going out and getting your own health care coverage, if you're not paying for it out of your own pocket every time you go to the doctor, if you don't have to think about it because it's already being provided, how does that make you more self-reliant, which the poster claims liberals lack and conservatives possess?
What's the philosophical and ideological difference between the government providing your health care or an employer providing your health care? Either way, you pay for it. With the government, it'd be through taxes. At work, it's taken out of your salary, or, indirectly, it's preventing you from getting a raise because you're employer is spending so much money to provide the benefits that he can't afford to give you one.
Either way, someone else is providing it for you. That's socialism, isn't it?
And either way, the costs are going to continue to rise until finally, your benefits are gone. You think people are in some sort of patriotic uproar now? You think people are angry now? I can't wait to see what happens when enough Americans lost their employer-provided health care benefits, because that day is coming and then it won't just be "liberals" or "socialists" or whoever demanding that health care be fixed.
And that's the real problem here. As someone recently said, "Human beings don't do things until they have to, and we do things that we shouldn't for as long as we can get away with them."
It is our nature.
In his Washington Post column, Kurtz argues that only piecemeal reform (like the kinds currently outlined in those 1,200-page bills) is possible until people are forced to confront the costs of their coverage. But that idea, he acknowledges, is "about as popular as a puppy pot roast."
Human beings don't do things until they have no other choice. Right now, we still have it too easy so we don't think about it. Don't worry: you're going to pay for that attitude. We all will. Just you wait.
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