Jun 21, 2005
Health care insurance cost outpacing inflation
Apparently, the cost of health care insurance as paid by employees went up about 5% more in the last year than inflation:
Health spending by privately insured Americans rose 8.2 percent in 2004, virtually the same increase as the previous year, analysts at the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan research group, found.
More significantly, for the eighth straight year the growth in medical costs far outpaced growth of wages — by nearly four times in 2004 — a trend that suggests more Americans will be unable to afford their health insurance, center President Paul Ginsburg said.
When is it going to end? Sooner or later something’s going to have to be done about the health care insurance mess in the US, but no politician is going to have the guts to stand up and do something about it, I think. It’s going to have to come to a total breakdown in the system it seems, before someone actually cares enough to act.