President Obama last Monday made an effort to bolster his case for a far-reaching overhaul of the health care system by latching on to the news that a California insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, was seeking double-digit rate increases for many of its 800,000 individual policyholders.
According to news reports, major insurers are seeking premium hikes for such individual policies €“ those people not covered through work.
If you’re paying your own premiums or you’re a business owner who must supply insurance to employees, you know how brutal health insurance costs already are. This on top of the impacts of the recession and, more recently here in Oregon, a load of new tax bills delivered by the voters who passed Measures 66 and 67.
Why health insurance premiums are rising, at a rate of double digits per year for many of us, is a complex tangle of forces that include rising costs of medical care, provider contracts, how and where services are used, cost-sharing, administrative costs and taxes. Insurance experts say actual profits really account for very little of most premium hikes.
But the fact remains: We can’t keep this up.
Obama is seizing on this latest news, and the outrage it stirs in many of us, to get the public and Congress to buy into the idea that his plans would solve the financial woes of those trying to pay for health care
For months the president has failed to voice a coherent argument for how he could do so without further running up the national debt.
In late February he claimed that a Congressional Budget Office report backed his argument that his plan would lower premiums. But the report in question actually estimated that, under Obama’s plan, average premiums per person covered (including dependents) for new individual (nongroup) policies would be about 10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than the average premium for nongroup coverage in that same year under current law.
Of course, the report acknowledged, if the government were to subsidize those premiums, then people would pay less.
But that gets us back to the problem of our already overwhelming national debt because this financial burden for healthcare would simply be shifted to taxpayers €“ or creditors, if there will be any left. It would be like your ne’er-do-well relative claiming that his rent has gone down when you know your grandmother has been paying a chunk of it. How absurd.
The president waxed populist Monday, saying, “We need to give families and businesses more control over their own health insurance and that’s why we need to pass health care reform, not next year, not five years from, now not 10 years from now, but now. If not now, when? If not us, who?”
Even in our pain, the answer should be: Not you.
When we look at “care” programs our government is involved in €“ Social Security, Medicare and their derivatives, the Veterans Affairs medical system, for example, it is clear that if the healthcare system proposed by Obama were even as successful as these, our health would be in jeopardy.
The woes of the Canadian system are well-documented. In February, Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams decided to undergo heart surgery in America rather than in Canada, saying that Canada’s socialized, government-run system is of such low quality not even he, the premier of one of its provinces, wants to risk his own health there.
“I did not sign away my right to get the best possible health care for myself when I entered politics,” he said, describing the decision as “my heart, my choice and my health.”
In Britain, which also has nationalized healthcare, patients are often fortunate to see a doctor at all, let alone in a timely fashion.
The United States’ healthcare problems are severe, but the cure needs to come from the market, from the industry. The medical and insurance communities don’t seem to be thinking beyond the present as they chisel money out of anyone who can pay for healthcare.
If they do not act soon to police themselves and figure out how to keep costs under control, the financially strapped public will look for a better way and our government will be waiting to “help.”
It will be a bitter pill for everyone who pays taxes when that happens.