Tuesday it was announced annual premiums for family health care insurance have risen 4 percent this year. Quite a welcome change from last year’s 9 percent.
But don’t crack open the champagne.
Premiums averaged $15,745 for family coverage, two major research organizations said. That amounts to $7.44 an hour for 52 40-hour weeks. That’s more than half the average wage in southeast Kansas. While most of health care insurance premiums are paid by employers, employees have been required to pick up more and more of the cost because the burden on business has become so large. Workers now pay about $4,300 of the annual cost — or more than $2 an hour, still a significant item at a time when wages are stagnant.
Premiums didn’t rise as much as the year before because a few of the cost-saving features of the Affordable Health Care Act kicked in. Most of them are not scheduled to become effective until 2014. Even then, however, health care in the United States will remain at about 17 percent of gross national product because coverage will expand under the act to cover most of those now uninsured.
Health care costs can be reduced to rich-world levels — between 8 and 11 percent of gross national product — by adopting single-payer plans similar to those that have been in effect for half a century or more in Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, France and most other rich nations. A single-payer plan eliminates the “middle man” of health insurance companies. A single source of funding — collected from employers, employees and the state — pays doctors and hospitals directly, eliminating “price adjustments” set by insurance companies.
The quality of health care provided in those nations is at least as high as it is in the U.S., as measured by health care outcomes.
The Obama health care act is not a single-payer plan. It makes some much-needed reforms, but maintains the fee-for-service system, which escalates costs and continues to depend on for-profit insurance companies for administration and revenue collection.
As a consequence, administrative costs run about 30 percent for care provided through for-profit insurance. Our system also provides opportunity for over-charging and outright fraud because there are so many players in the field that oversight is ineffective. Costs also rise because specialists can set their own fees and operate their own hospitals and testing facilities — to which they send their patients.
Many of them therefore have incomes in the nation’s top 1 percent — incomes they earn at the expense of ever-rising health insurance premiums.
THE AFFORDABLE Health Care Act was an important first step toward gaining control over U.S. health care costs. But it is only a first step. Only through a single-payer system can the price-setting controls be achieved which will make universal health care available to Americans at the truly affordable costs which have been achieved by so many nations for so many years.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
