Rising Health Insurance Rates Hurting Businesses, Families and Individuals

Welcome to this edition of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. Many articles I found for this installment focused on the rising costs of health insurance and how it affects just about everyone. We'll look at a couple of them that are particularly poignant.

The first interesting tidbits come to us from Families USA, a non-profit group in Washington, D.C. In a recent series of state-specific reports, they've found that the costs of health insurance are rising several times more than people's earnings. The series, called "Premiums Vs. Paychecks: A Growing Burden for Workers," looks at the differences between rising health costs and rising earnings, and the disparity between the two. The first round of reports focused on states such as Pennsylvania, Missouri and Indiana, for example, and more reports will be released throughout September and October.

In looking at some of the reports, the results are fairly startling. In Pennsylvania, for example, health care and health insurance premiums rose 6.4 times faster than earnings, or 86.2 percent rise in the cost of premiums versus a 13.2 percent rise in earnings. In Missouri, health insurance premiums rose 76.1 percent while earnings rose only 17.3 percent. Similar findings were seen in other states such as Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio and so on. According to Families USA, this represents an even greater burden on people as their incomes stagnate while health care costs continue to rise.

These findings, personally, frustrate and concern me. How are we all supposed to be able to afford high quality health insurance in order to get the health care we really need if our incomes aren't in line with the rising costs of that health care? These kinds of articles make me more and more of a fan of a universal health care system, like those found in Canada and the U.K.

In another article from the Associated Press, this one entitled, "Health insurance costs grow more gradually in 2008," they state that health insurance costs have risen about five percent since the year prior. The article also states that employers are enrolling their employees more often in high-deductible plans in order to save money, as the article states, "In just one year, the percentage of workers enrolled in high-deductible insurance of $1,000 or more jumped from 12 percent to 18 percent."

It's not clear what can be done about this, though. The articles states that, "Democratic lawmakers said the Kaiser report showed that out-of-pocket costs for insurance will continue to rise faster than wages without major legislative actions." The article then goes on to quote lawmakers who support universal health care coverage, citing that, "until we have universal coverage, these cost shifts away from insurers to consumers will continue." Hopefully this will happen eventually, but it's unclear how or when.

That wraps up this edition of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. I hope you've found this latest issue informative and interesting, and I thank you for reading it.