Unhealthy Growth
If health insurance premiums and national wages continue to grow at current rates, the average cost of a family health insurance premium will surpass the average annual household income by 2025, approximately the time when the Medicare trust fund is projected to be insolvent.
I don’t know what the answer is- nationalization, privatization, boutique medical treatment, some sort of hybrid, or something completely new, but this is a serious issue, and the numbers don’t just get scary in 17 years. It’s looking like sometime during the next presidential term most Americans are going to have to take a hard look at their medical insurance and just quit paying premiums, either that or start doing without absolute necessities (and I’m not talking iPhones and cable tv here).
Much of the waste and out of control costs go not to the doctors, but to the lawyers and insurance companies themselves. Whenever we go to the doctor, we just pay out of pocket and usually get a 20-30% instant rebate on the bill- which is the market’s way of saying that there is a huge amount of waste in the system.
I’m happy that we live in a prosperous country. I’m happy that life spans are so dramatically better than they were even three generations ago, and I’m not unwilling to see a company turn a profit (a company is just made up of people, after all). But the system is badly broken and right now it seems like they only thing that will catalyze a fix is a complete breakdown. Which looks like it will happen, at the latest, by the end of the next decade.