Health Insurance Costs Rising Too

It appears that you don’t have to be a Gulf Coast municipality or a Florida homeowner to see your insurance costs rise, according to t his wire service story:

Two studies released Wednesday reported health care costs in the United States are rising rapidly for employed and retired persons.

One of the studies, by consulting and actuarial firm Milliman Inc., finds a family of four insured by a preferred provider organization can expect to pay an average of $13,382 annually, up 9.6 percent from 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.[.]

Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a global management-consulting firm, issued a separate study that found many businesses plan to either impose restrictions on retiree medical plans or eliminate them altogether.

The transitioning of the U.S. health care industry to a managed-care model (e.g. HMO) did a lot to temporarily offset the force of medical cost inflation, by allegedly promoting more sensible utilization of expensive resources.

However, now that that transition has been made, and the managed care organizations have picked all the low-hanging fruit from the efficiency tree, we’re seeing medical cost inflation become unmasked again.

I’ll say it again: Either we are going to pay the price, or we need to have a discussion as a society in the very near future as to “how much” medical care should we have. It’s great to live in a country where the latest and greatest technology is relatively easily accessible to many folks. However, are we as a society willing to pay the costs associated with ease-of-access and technological sophistication?