According to the Kaiser Foundation pages, most Americans get their medical insurance coverage from a wide array of sources. They may have it through an employer, from a private purchase that they made based on their own research, or they may take part in multiple public health programs that are available in the United States, such as Medicare, or Medicaid.
Even with these remarkable programs in place, the studies show us that while more than 150 million Americans who are under the age of 55 do have employer sponsored health care, many more, both elderly and non-elderly Americans have no health care benefits to speak of at all. The uninsured in America don’t just encompass the elderly, or the very poor, but quite often take in parts of middle class America, who just can’t pay for the cost of the health care coverage they need.
The price of health care coverage, even from some employers is far above what many employees can pay,with one mid-sized company in Grand Island, Nebraska charging more than one half an employees paycheck to permit them to purchase family coverage rather than just employee coverage.
The additional 10 million plus people who buy their medical insurance from an insurance company or an HMO are seeing a rise in the cost of that insurance, so that they too may have no way to afford it in a short amount of time.
Medical insurance costs continue to rise, and spending for medical insurance is projected to be nearly doubled within a five year time span.
Amazingly, the cost of health care is going up at an alarming rate, with health care spending currently accounting for about 15 percent of the GNP in 2008. That figure is projected to rise to almost 18 percent by the year 2010.
The cost of premiums for those who have their own private medical insurance has risen so dramatically that there were double-digit rate hikes each year for the first three years of the new century. During this same time span the cost of payments, co-payments, the medical insurance deductibles, and other methods of monetary compensation to the health care providers has gone up significantly enough that many can’t afford even the health care co-pays.
All of these increases in the cost of health insurance plans and medical care, in combination with the presence of those who do not have medical insurance, have let to major debates about the need to control the rising cost of health care, and the means by which we can do so.
Surveys tell us that those who are uninsured, or under insured today number more than half of all Americans, with the remainder seeing their out-of-pocket expenses rising dramatically enough that they will be ill able to afford health care at all eventually. This holds especially those on a fixed income, such as our nation’s elderly residents.
With all of these things to think about, what can we do to control the costs of health care and medical insurance? The simple truth is, that there just aren’t any simple answers.
