The U.S. healthcare system has been broken for a long time and, while President Barack Obama and the Democrats have made changes, the health of Americans remains at the mercy of the capitalist system.
A new study issued today found that health costs have continued their steep rise, outstripping the growth in wages and leaving Americans with less money in their pockets.
A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group that tracks employer-sponsored health insurance on a yearly basis, shows that the average annual premium for family coverage through an employer reached $15,073 in 2011, an increase of 9 percent over the previous year.
“The open question is whether that’s a one-time spike or the start of a period of higher increases,” said Drew Altman, the chief executive of the Kaiser foundation.
The rising costs make getting care more expensive, of course, and also makes it difficult for businesses.
Many businesses cite the high cost of coverage as a factor in their decision not to hire, and health insurance has become increasingly unaffordable for more Americans. Over all, the cost of family coverage has about doubled since 2001, when premiums averaged $7,061, compared with a 34 percent gain in wages over the same period.
Republican critics will blame Obama for the increases, but that is shortsighted and purely political. The system has been malfunctioning for years with prices rising and healthoutcomes in decline.
Where Obama failed was in removing the one solution from the table that could have made a dent: a Canadian-style single-payer system, sometimes referred to as Medicare-for-All. Single-payer systems have lower overhead and they remove profit, which distorts the provision of care. Insurance companies make money not by improving and expanding care, but by writing policies, collecting premiums and limiting care. Medicare-for-All will require some rationing, but it will function more like triage than the purely profit-driven rationing we labor with now.
It maybe a long slog politically to make this happen, but we need to start agitating to end the insurance company greedfest that passes for the American system.
Hank Kalet 