If any one has not already watched it, I would recommend the PBS Frontline program “Sick Around the World” (Google the title to find the link).
The program reviews how a number of capitalist democracies provide universal healthcare for their citizens at lower cost per person and with better health statistics that we achieve here in the US. The way each country funds and provides its healthcare is different. The one thing they all have in common is that insurers, healthcare providers, and pharmaceutcal companies are all regulated and the cost of their products or services are controlled.
I have been getting my healthcare coverage through my local chamber of commerce (from a variety of Mass-based insurance companies; Tufts, Neighborhood Health, and Fallon). Every year, my premiums have increased by double digit percentages without explanation or justification.
And, from what I read here and elsewhere, I am not alone in that experience. Nowhere else in the economy does one see relentless increases on that scale. And, in the long run, this is unsustainable. Very few individuals or businesses have incomes or revenues increasing 15%, 20%, 39% per year.
And our politicians just do not seem to “get it.” The Republicans are simply pursuing a mindless vendetta against Obama and are contributing nothing to solving this healthcare problem that affects all Americans regardless of their political leanings.
And the Democrats have shown themselves to be both politically inept, and largely subservient to the healthcare special interests. The idea, in the recent Democratic bill, that an American citizen would be penalized $8,000 per year for failing to purchase insurance from a private insurer when there would seem to be no controls proposed on the coverage and cost that the private insurer provides is basically a sick joke that only a lobbyist or a Congressman would fine funny.
The irony, of course, is that we will, inevitably, have cost controls because the increase in healthcare costs is simply unsustainable. Unless we do something meaningful to control systemic healthcare costs (i.e. at all levels, insurers, hospitals, drug companies) then sometime in the next 5 or 10 years, no one who isn’t a Wall Street banker will be able to afford coverage at all… The average middle class salary is not increasing by 25% or more per year. At what happens then… We all get penalized $8,000 and have no coverage at all?
Doug Denholm
Chemical Engineer
Salem, MA
