Healthy Future US Blog

The massive new Affordable Care Act subsidies in the $1.9T American Rescue Plan are still not enough.   They never will be. "By next year, taxpayers will shell out more than $8,500 for every American who gets a subsidized health plan through insurance marketplaces created by the ACA, often called Obamacare."  Yet many with those plans will still have a $6,000 or so out-of-pocket deductible, on top of their subsidized premiums.  That  recent analysis  by NPR & Kaiser Family Foundation reinforces our previous blog posts.  Many people will be better off with a lower salary and "free" Medicaid coverage than a higher salary--even with highly subsidized ACA health insurance plans.  And "affordability" does not mean throwing unlimited federal money at something that is too expensive to begin with.   Let's face it (even though we still don't want to)--a s long as we are this unhealthy, we can't afford our health care.   So let's ge...

The US Preventive Services Task Force just recommended that people get tested for diabetes at a younger age: 35. Early detection will help prevent complications from untreated diabetes. “The lowered recommended age for screening ‘has really been driven by the obesity epidemic—greater rates of obesity in young people.’” (WSJ, 3/16/2021) If this preliminary draft recommendation is approved, many insurers will provide this testing for free. Actually, with about 20% of teens estimated to have prediabetes & 10% with severe obesity already, & 1/3 lower-income kids & children of color headed for diabetes, testing should start much earlier for at-risk young adults--perhaps @25 years old. The more I think about these statistics, the angrier I get. We should have declared a national child health emergency in the late 1970s, when the child obesity epidemic began. If those kids had been upper-income white children, we would have dealt with it much sooner. Yet in spite of some imp...

Are you an idiot for going to college?   We've been told for decades: get a college degree and make a lot more money. Then over the last decade or two, we started hearing about millions of people overwhelmed with college debt, whose post-college salary could not pay off their loans.  Living in their parents' basement.  Bankrupt. But it's even worse:  To calculate your disposable income post-college, you should subtract out your college debt repayments & lost wages while attending college & your portion of employer-provided health insurance (premiums, co-pays, out-of-pocket costs).  Then look at your "real" salary.   Ouch!   Particularly if you or someone in your family is at-risk of a chronic condition , you could have been better off with a low-paying job and being on Medicaid (free government health coverage). For example, if you attended a state university in Arizona, the median salary in 2018 was $51,197. But subtract colle...