Spiraling Costs

An essential step to economic recovery is controlling the spiraling cost of health care. We’re spending over $2 trillion a year on health care, which is nearly 50 percent more per person than the next most costly nation. Nevertheless, every day more Americans become uninsured and the quality of care is lessened.

The cost of our health care is a threat to our economy and a serious burden on our families and businesses. Some doctors spend 20 percent of each day supervising a staff explaining insurance problems to patients, completing authorization forms, and writing appeal letters. It’s a routine, which has become distracting and taken time away from patient care.

Nationwide, over one third of small businesses have reduced healthcare benefits and another third have had to drop their workers’ coverage altogether. A major cause of the financial problems at General Motors and Chrysler were the huge costs of providing health care for their workers. As those costs grew those companies became less profitable, and competitive with automakers around the world.

The cost of our present health care is unsustainable. Health care reform is a necessity, because the cost of inaction is rapidly increasing. Failure to act soon will see premiums increasing, benefits eroding, and the rolls of the uninsured swelling to include more than a million additional Americans.

If we fail to act, one out of every five dollars we earn will have to be spent on health care within a decade. In thirty years, that trend that will mean lost jobs, lower take-home pay, shuttered businesses, and a lower standard of living for all Americans.

Federal spending on Medicaid and Medicare will grow over the coming decades by an amount almost equal to the amount our government currently spends on our nation’s defense.