Healthy Future US Blog

The second in a series of rants on this critical but wantonly overlooked issue: The latest news is quite terrifying.  We are reverting to an even higher, pre-Great-Recession-level  health care inflation rate of 6% for the foreseeable future.  Given the power of compounding, together with household income stagnating during the last 25 years and also for the foreseeable future, the average American family can be expected to pay twice as much of their income for health care 20 years from now.  Health costs will rise from around 10% of household income to 20%--from around $5,000 to $10,000 on a salary of about $52,000 by 2035, in real/2015 $$.  Some of you may say, "Scott, you are extrapolating for 20 years, nothing ever keeps trending the same way for that long, things change."  I wish that were true in this case.  Health care costs have been trending well above inflation and wage increases for 35+ years.  Yet the obliviousness to the consequences continues. It is

There was an op-ed by the Wall Street Journal editorial board this morning blasting recent health insurance premium increases under the Affordable Care Act (ACA, i.e., "Obamacare").  The most interesting line in the editorial was: "Underlying health costs continue to rise, but this trend is merely about 3.5% to 7% depending on the state."  " Merely "!?!  Given that average US real wages only increased a bit over 2% with no CPI inflation over the past year , "health costs" as defined here are going up around 2-3 times faster than people's ability to pay.  This is consistent with trends over the past 30+ years of rarely-abated high health care inflation.  At least the WSJ got one thing right:  the ACA's promise of prevention and lowering health care costs has proven to be a fig leaf, covering up the main ACA priority of increasing access to health care--a noble but very expensive and ultimately unaffordable goal when health care costs