Health care has become so expensive in the US now that it has become a threat to public safety.
At least that’s the message out of Okanogan County, Washington, where Sheriff Paul Budrow announced this month he’s stepping down because the elected position doesn’t come with health insurance for his family.
"The trust you placed in me to lead the Sheriff’s Office and serve this county is something I will always be grateful for," Budrow wrote in a statement. "This role has never been just a position — it has been a responsibility to stand alongside dedicated deputies and staff who care deeply about this community. … As an elected official, the Sheriff’s position does not provide insurance benefits, and ensuring healthcare coverage and financial stability for my family became a responsibility I could not set aside.”
Health care affordability has become a national issue, with President Donald Trump having discussed it in his State of the Union address. It’s probably better for Congress to address this issue rather than to let the problem keep getting worse and worse.
To combat this plague of unaffordability, the House Energy & Commerce health subcommittee will hold a hearing on March 18 “Lowering Health Care Costs for All Americans: An Examination of the U.S. Provider Landscape.”
The goal is to “understand what can be done to make health care more affordable for all Americans,” Subcommittee Chairman Morgan Griffith (R-VA) said in a press release announcing the hearing. “From consolidation in the insurance marketplace to predatory practices in the pharmaceutical drug supply chain, the Health Subcommittee continues to examine all angles in our push to lower health care costs for American patients.”
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This is the third in a series of hearings where the committee has been raking insurers and drug makers over the coals. Health insurance executives have made themselves easy, bipartisan targets. CEOs of America’s six largest publicly traded health insurance companies earned nearly $123 million last year – or about $20 million each.
When we talk about federal health care funding, we usually talk in billions, but $123 million is still a lot of money. And every dollar counts as impending Medicaid cuts loom on the horizon.
If these cuts go through, they will hit hospitals and communities hard. The cost of covering those cuts is probably going to be transferred to the state level, which means it will ultimately hit taxpayers and patients at a time when private insurers are hiking rates and withdrawing plans from some areas because it’s not profitable enough.
Hospital expenses continue to rise, outstripping growth in hospital prices. “However,” as the American Hospital Association (AHA) Costs of Caring report notes, “this mismatch between expenses and revenue leaves hospitals increasingly at risk of being able to maintain the full spectrum of services on which communities rely.”
If the gap between costs and prices rises too far this could lead to further consolidation in the health care sector, which would let big corporate insurers squeeze patients even more. (Yes, the amount you pay for your insurance now could be even worse.) Now some are calling for further cuts to hospitals, which are already unsure about financial stability as they brace for Medicaid cuts, instead of focusing on the harmful insurer practices that burden caregivers while putting barriers between patients and the care they need.
Now of course there is a reasonable amount of profit an industry needs to make in order to survive. If it’s not profitable to provide insurance, then the companies that do it will stop. But let’s keep in mind that every dollar of profit by an insurance company is a dollar that is either not going to reimburse a provider or a dollar not spent on care for a patient.
The very least thing insurance companies can do is agree to work better with providers. Last year, hospitals had to spend $43 billion chasing payments stuck in “administrative limbo” because of claim denials, repeated documentation requests, and so on. And of course they pass that cost along to patients, making everything more expensive.
Of course, just throwing money at the problem isn’t going to fix it. Washington’s throwing money at health care is probably why we’re in the situation we’re in, because once everybody realized they could charge Uncle Sam’s credit card, prices shot through the roof. Given that the country spends more on health care than on defense, the cost of federally funded health care constitutes a threat to national security.
Going into the mid-terms, everyone wants to be able to tell their voters that they have the silver bullet to fix what ails the country’s health care affordability woes. Let’s hope that’s something everyone in Congress can agree on. The Energy and Commerce hearing will be livestreamed here.
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