Americans Finding They Can No Longer Afford Insurance

QUOTE: ‘What we're seeing is a market that's gotten so mature and beyond its customer[s] that people can literally no longer afford to buy the product,’ said Sheryl Skolnick, an analyst with CRT Capital Group. ‘The number of uninsured is growing faster than any player in the game, and it's getting bigger.’

That was from a Wall Street Journal story about the insurance industry. --

When our country decided back in 1919 that it was not going to go the same route as several European nations and embrace national health care, we never imagined that the private health insurance industry could price itself out of the market.

Health care bills have been rising even though doctor bills have been pretty steady. The reason is that more services are ordered -- the X-ray or MRI, the technician to take the X-ray or MRI, the physician specialist to read the X-ray or MRI, the drugs needed for the MRI, the nurse assistant to administer the drugs so that they can take the MRI, etc. You get the idea.

Even managed care has been unable to keep the cost of medical care down. The insurer may arbitrarily decide on a fee for a mammogram, usually $100. The provider may actually bill $300 to cover costs, etc. A mastectomy really costs $5000, but the insurance may only pay $800 or so. Where is the difference going to be made up?
The patient cannot afford to pay both the insurance premiums AND the balance of his medical bill. All too often, he or she may decide, hey, I am not getting my money’s worth out of this deal so I am foregoing the insurance. And this is the decision being reached by employers, too.

Stop and digest this figure -- 6.4 million fewer workers had employer-sponsored health insurance in 2006 than in 2000, according to the Economic Policy Institute. By the way, there are a total of roughly 47 million Americans without health insurance at all, and about 9 million kids with no coverage. How did we come to this state of affairs, and what do we do about it?

Part of the problem is that a nice system, the HMO, was twisted around to serve as a profit-generating mechanism. In the process, premiums rose from 1993 to 2003 by over 7%, but administrative costs rose by 500%. No one can stay in business for long with those kinds of statistics.

I can attest that insurers are under big pressure to reduce their costs. I used to work behind the scenes and saw the cuts in staffing, the reliance on faster computers and software to process mountains of claims (about 4,000 to 6,000 claims a day were received by that company), and the many small cost-cutting measures that affected worker morale.
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PS --
I found a blog about health matters that was very interesting. Here is that writer’s take on “The Managed Health Care Roller Coaster” at http://www.healthbeatblog.org/2008/07/the-managed-car.html.