In the most unsurprising development of health care reform—-the Obama iteration that awkwardly tries to fuse private and public coverage plans, thereby preserving the billion dollar health care “insurance” industry—- it has become apparent that the increased costs employers expect to pay for health care have simply been passed on to its employees.
Since 2005, while wages have increased just 18 percent, workers’ contributions to premiums have jumped 47 percent, almost twice as fast as the rise in the policy’s overall cost.
Workers also increasingly face higher deductibles, forcing them to pay a larger share of their overall medical bills. “The long-term trend is pretty clear,” said Drew E. Altman, the chief executive of the Kaiser foundation, which conducted the survey this year with the Health Research and Educational Trust, a research organization affiliated with the American Hospital Association. “Insurance is getting stingier and less comprehensive.”……companies expect that their costs will only go up more under the new health care law because it requires them to provide more benefits, like coverage for preventive care.
Unbelievable isn’t it? Who would have thought that for-profit entities would do everything in their power to stay in the black. Given the choice to pay the higher health care costs out of a healthy profit margin versus freezing employee wages and earnings, it’s hardly surprising that the private sector opts for the latter.
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Simply mandating that companies pay for health care without articulating a method of subsidizing it or controlling the escalating cost of health care provision (beyond vague, unspecific programs like the Independent Payment Advisory Board) is not a viable long term solution to the crisis. That is the failure of Obamacare.
Dr. Jeffrey Parks is a board certified general surgeon working in Cleveland who writes regularly at Buckeye Surgeon.
