No, I haven’t forgotten my goal of self-education on foreign policy, but that’s taken the back burner here. At least for this week, a number of local bloggers are talking about health care, particularly in conjunction with a number of legislative and referenda initiatives. Blue Mass Group, organizers of Health Week here in the MA blogosphere, offer a useful reading list.
Hopefully I can have more to add, but for now I’ll point to the good work being done at Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a policy think tank that offers useful studies. Essentially, the big picture is this:
Costs go up. Insurance premiums have slowed in their rate of growth, but that just means they’re only increasing 9% annually rather than the 14% increase of 2003. Still, it far outpaces inflation and wage growth.
The insured pay more. "Employers appear to be embracing increased consumer responsibility and higher cost sharing as strategies for reducing the growth in health care costs." The percentage of high-deductable among employer-provided insurance has risen from 5% (2003) to 10% (2004) to 20% (2005)
Fewer Employers are providing insurance. "The percentage of all firms offering health benefits to their employees has fallen significantly from 69% to 60% over the last 5 years."
Fewer Employees are insured. The percentage of workers covered by their employer. has gone down from 65% at the start of the decade to 61% today. That doesn’t include the self-employed and unemployed. Altogether, over 41 million are without insurance in the U.S.
I’ll add more as I do a little more research, but what’s striking is that the problems in health coverage that we’ve faced throughout the late 90s and early 00s (increasing costs, decreased efficiency, and increasing numbers of uninsured) have taken on a more acute character in the last three or so years.
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