Health Care Costs Take Record-Sized Chunk Out of Economy
Earlier this week, we noted a new study that predicts health insurance premiums will jump between 10 percent and 11 percent this year. Now a new government report says health care costs last year took the biggest bite ever out of the nation’s economy.
The non-partisan Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reports that health care spending ate up a record 17.3 percent of the nation’s economy, or $2.5 trillion, in 2009, up from 16.2 percent in 2008. That is the largest one-year jump in 50 years. In 1960, health care costs consumed just 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
Over the past 50 years, as health care costs have soared and working families pay more and more for less and less, profits have skyrocketed in the health care industry, especially the private health insurance industry.
Yet the Party of No Republican opposition to meaningful health care reform means these through-the-roof costs for families and the entire nation will climb higher and higher.
Comprehensive health care reform would slow the growth in health care spending, lower working families’ costs and maybe even take small bite of health care profits. There’s the rub, and the big reason Republicans and the health insurance industry have lined up against real reform.
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My uncle is a hospital administrator. My dad is a chiropractor and toxicologist. My mom a radiation therapist. (in training)
So as you can see, I've had a lot of experience with the medical world at quite a few different levels. My uncle deals with administration of multiple doctors . My dad runs his own practice and my mom is bottom rung at a hospital.
All of them agree, the profits are not up. We even have our annual earnings to prove it. However, over head keeps going up.
They get a new regulation that they have to follow, they have to honor this or that which will never pay them back. They have to pay to have such and such paper work filled out over and over. Repeat tests. They have dozens of laws controlling every thing they say and do. The book of laws for my mom is almost 100 pages long, some of them contradicting. Many repeated.
It isn't the health care professionals that are to blame. It is bureaucratic law makers that jump in and meddle with things to feel good about them selves. And they jump in without seeing what has already been done before, or to find out why they should or shouldn't do it.
The "Comprehensive Health care reform" you speak of is a bureaucratic monstrosity. That would add thousands and thousand of hours of paperwork to the medical process. If you don't think that will add to the costs, let me ask you this.
What is 1000 times 7.25? What happens when that is done over and over again and added to the process.
Every new bit of paper work, every new government regulation just makes health care go up in price. They keep passing them, while knowing this, because they want to make us dependant on their "reforms"
No thank you, pack your things and get out.