Health Care or a Hyundai?
An L.A. Times reporter put tongue-firmly-in-check with this question, and in so doing painted a vivid picture to mark an unfortunate milestone. According to the Milliman Medical Index, health care costs for a family of four now average $20,728 nationally, roughly the equivalent of buying a mid-size sedan.
The catch being that the people tend to buy a car every 5.5 years on average, while health care spending is annual. Put another way, health care bills are keeping you out of that used Maserati every family of four deserves.
Within the context of interest rates at all-time lows, a deep recession and an unsteady economic outlook, health care costs have somehow increased between six and eight percent annually for the past five years. Good health may be priceless, but health care is just plain pricier by the day.
The healthcare costs are intolerable and unsustanianable. So why don”t we hear more public or professional outrage and demand for realistic change. Why doesn’t some one or public minded organization like SLHI institute a project to seriously analyze the programs of the other industrialized nations who provide care to all of their residents at 40% to 50% less than we and with better outcomes. Why must we be held hostage to the deceiving, regressive, disingenuous, inaccurate rhetoric of the regressive thinking politicians who tell us unconfirmed lies that our people do not want meaningful reform or that it will not work in the United States, although untried? Is it not, also, a moral travesty that we allow people to die because they have no access to timely medical care?
Comment by gerald weiner — May 19, 2012 @ 12:04 pm