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Monday, January 7th, 2013

Five Facts About Obamacare and Health Premiums

Author:     SARAH KLIFF
Source:     The Washington Post
Publication Date:     6-Jan-13
 Link: Five Facts About Obamacare and Health Premiums
Stephan:   I recently went, as part of my annual physical, to have a sonagram. It took about 30 minutes and cost $2750. The same test in France would be about $238. Are the French machines less advanced? No. Are the technicians less well trained? No. So why does this relatively straightforward test cost more than 11 times as much in the U.S. as it does in France? Taken to a broader scale why do we spend over 17 per cent of our GNP, and we have the 37th best healthcare system in the world while the French who spend about 11 per cent have the best healthcare in the world? Or, put another way. Why can't the United States figure out how to get decent healthcare for all its people? The answer, of course, while complex in its details, is pretty simple in its fundamentals. The French have a healthcare system whose purpose is national wellness. We have a system whose purpose is to produce profit. Until that changes there is very little hope for change. Click through to see the charts that accompany this article.

The New York Times took a long look Sunday at the double-digit premium increases that have persisted under the Affordable Care Act. It’s a good story and good moment to look back at how health insurance premiums have changed, what role the Affordable Care Act has played and what happens moving forward.

1. The average American family pays $15,022 a year in health insurance premiums. There is a fair amount of variation by state though, which you can see in this chart from the Commonwealth Fund.

That same Commonwealth Fund report finds that 80 percent of Americans now live in states where health insurance premiums equaled 20 percent or more of average income. All states’ average premiums now work out to at least 14 percent of average household income.

2. Insurance premium growth has wiped out the last decade of wage growth. Overall, that middle-income family saw its income go up by $23,000, from $76,000 in 1999 to $99,000 in 2009 – not too bad. But rising health-care costs in the form of increased insurance premiums and co-pays, ate up nearly all of that. Factor in that spending, as a recent Health Affairs article did, and the average family only had $95 […]

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