Healthcare burden growing

"Most people who in the past said they'd like to see health-care reform essentially did that out of an impulse of altruism for somebody else," he said. "What is changing that is so significant, is that . . . it's now an issue of self-interest."

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/busin...n_growing.html

Healthcare burden growing
Nearly one-quarter of Americans under 65--61.6 million people--live in families that will spend more than 10 percent of their income on healthcare in 2008, according to a report from Families USA.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov 29, 2007

That's interesting. According to figures HM2Viking posted in another thread promoting Universal Healthcare, families would likely pay more than 10% of their income in premiums and other out of pocket costs for a nationalized plan. This puts things in better perspective.

Is that 10% in addition to the cost of having private health insurance? Why have private health insurance if it denies you coverage?

No. I'm talking about the proposed cost of employer and employee payroll taxes to fund national healthcare, in addition to the out-of-pocket costs that are likely to be part of a national plan. I am not talking about private insurance, because we would no longer have such an option. For a family with a single earner, the cost would be approximately 10% of his/her income. For dual income families and families whose children are employed, the cost would increase sharply, due to premiums being deducted from every working family members' paychecks.

See post # 30 of this thread:

http://allnurses.com/forums/f195/mas...-264327-3.html

Paying For National Health Insurance—And Not Getting It

Taxes pay for a larger share of U.S. health care than most Americans
think they do.

by Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein

ABSTRACT: The threat of steep tax hikes has torpedoed the debate over national health insurance.

Yet according to our calculations, the current tax-financed share of health spending
is far higher than most people think: 59.8 percent.
This figure (which is about fifteen
percentage points higher than the official Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [CMS] estimate) includes health care–related tax subsidies and public employees’ health benefits, neither of which are classified as public expenditures in the CMS accounting framework.

U.S. tax-financed health spending is now the highest in the world. Indeed, our
tax-financed costs exceed total costs in every nation except Switzerland. But the sub rosa character of much tax-financed health spending in the United States obscures its regressivity. Public spending for care of the poor, elderly, and disabled is hotly debated and intensely scrutinized.
But tax subsidies that accrue mostly to the affluent and health benefits for middle-class government workers are mostly below the radar screen.

National health insurance would require smaller tax increases than most people imagine and would make government’s role in financing care more visible and explicit....

...The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) pegs the government’s
share of health spending in the United States at 45.3 percent

This figure reflects an accounting framework based on who wrote the last
check in the sequence from individual households to providers—a government
program or private payer.

Thus, the CMS classifies health benefits for soldiers as
government health expenditures, since government actually writes the checks to
pay military hospitals and doctors.

In contrast, health benefits for FBI agents are labeled as private health expenditures because a private insurer pays the claims....

http://www.pnhp.org/publications/payingnotgetting.pdf

I would hope that there would be no out of pocket costs, or very little at worst. I would also hope there would be no "caps" on coverage expenses, or that there would be no more medical bankruptcies. I still think that we should not put our medical care access into the hands of a private for profit corporation, whose bottom line has been greed. I say keep employers out of the health insurance equation altogether.I think that your projections on cost are not correct, we will have to see what the actual proposals for funding are when we come closer to actually getting a firm plan that is agreed on by the American public. Its just too soon to tell.

I understand your "hopes", but think it would be unwise to place our healthcare in the hands of a government bureaucracy based strictly on hopes. We need cold, hard figures. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the figures in Viking's source. I merely calculated expenses based on the figures he provided, and found the costs to be excessive. The article Karen posted to initiate this thread decries the situation of families having to spend 10% or more of their income on healthcare. This government proposal starts out at a minimum of 10%, and as history demonstrates, will only increase from there.

Medicare is a program that millions of people would not be willing to part with in favor of a private plan, ever wonder why?