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Price of health insurance not going down, yet
Stethoscope lying on money
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TEXT OF STORY
Bob Moon: Like millions of employees across the nation around this time of year, we at Marketplace got "the talk" this week. This is when workers sign up for health insurance plans. We just found out our premiums are going up pretty significantly. And it's not just us.
The National Business Group on Health -- a body that represents big employers -- estimates premiums for company-paid plans will rise by roughly 9 percent this year.
But wait a minute. Didn't we just pass a huge health care reform bill that was supposed to help people afford health care coverage? We sent card-carrying health insurance customer Stacey Vanek Smith to check it out.
Stacey Vanek Smith: Even doctors are paying more for health insurance. David Taragin is a neurologist in Silver Springs, Md. Last year, his premiums rose 35 percent and this year...
David Taragin: Our premiums have gone up about 13.5 percent, but the real kicker is that the coverage levels have dramatically dropped.
Meaning more out-of-pocket costs. Health insurance premiums have more than doubled in the last decade. Industry analyst Robert Laszewski says much of the increase has to do with costly new treatments and overhead. And, he says, the bad economy is making things worse.
Robert Laszewski: In poor economic times you tend to have the sicker people keep their coverage and the healthy people drop their coverage. And as a result, you tend to get higher rate increases.
Laszewski says cost-conscious employers are foisting more of that burden onto employees. But wasn't health care reform supposed to lower our costs?
Alan Garber: Most of the fixes aren't in place yet.
That's Alan Garber, director of the Center for Health Policy at Stanford. He says the parts of health care reform that could help push premiums down don't go into effect until 2014. Like the individual mandate, which requires everyone to buy health insurance.
Garber: The reason for this provision is to make sure healthy people purchase health insurance so that when you figure out the premium for a group of insured people, it can be relatively low.
That's for so-called health care exchanges, where people will be able shop for health insurance -- in 2014. Until then, you can probably add rising health insurance premiums to that old saying about death and taxes.
In New York, I'm Stacey Vanek Smith for Marketplace.
Moon: By the way, we've got a comprehensive look at some of the changes in store for health care on our website.
My husband just started a new job and we found out our medical insurance cost will be about $800 a month. That is insane!! He lost his job in May and we are so thankful that he got another job, but we have two kids that need to go to the doctor/dentist. The cost of the insurance is the same as our house payment. We cannot afford two house payments! I just do not understand with the way the economy is the government continues to raise rates on everything. If we actually had some people with a brain in our government we would not be in this situation. We are a middle class family of four and we are always the ones that get screwed. We pay our bills on time, pay taxes and pay our own way. People like us are always the ones that get punished. I know we are not alone.
I just got a letter saying that my children were Denied for Nevada Check Up. I don't know what else to do now. My husbands employer provides health Insurance but our portion went from around $400 to over $800 a month. That is about a third of our monthly income. We just can't afford that. I thought that maybe we would just have to tuff it out till next year but from what I see that hope is no longer. What do people in my situation do? I am afraid we will be denied if we try to get our own insurance. My daugther has two specialist that we cannot afford.
The "individual mandate" isn't a "fix" any more than amputation is a "fix," even for gangrene or something that can only be treated by amputation. Similarly, nobody's arguing about *why* the bill's proponents wanted it; the debate is about whether the individual mandate is even constitutional, which is to say *legal*, and whether the benefits outweigh the costs. How about some reasoned discussion of those issues, rather than just arguing for the undisputed facts?
According to this Marketplace report from September (http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/09/09/am-study-healt...) the health care reform will only increase costs. I haven't heard any study say that the health care reform, as passed, will decrease costs.
