This diary is not about health insurance reform.
Health and Human Services has projected that U.S. health care costs will destroy the middle class.
That is a fact.
In response, The U.S. manufacturering industry began to lobby the Obama Administration for reforms, fearing that they would go bankrupt from excessive pension costs.
And guess what, Health Insurance reform locked in these prices!
(okay, it mentions it but that is about it)
Will insurance reform address these industry costs? How is this class warfare?
new and improved charts, referenced links after the orange. . .
Here are the negotiated agreement for long-term profits by the price-gouging industries:
Hospitals Agree to $155 Billion Health-Overhaul Deal (Update 1)
By James Rowley and Lisa Rapaport
July 7 (Bloomberg) -- The hospital industry agreed to $155 billion in cost savings over 10 years to help finance President Barack Obama’s plan to overhaul U.S. health care, a person familiar with the negotiations said.
The agreement will be announced at the White House tomorrow, said the person, a health-care lobbyist. The deal is the second in less than a month among industry groups, the administration and the Senate Finance Committee to help fund an expansion of medical insurance to the estimated 46 million Americans who lack it.
Hospitals account for about 31 percent of annual health- care spending in the U.S., and will produce $11 trillion in revenue over 10 years, said Princeton University economist Uwe E. Reinhardt in an interview today.
Here is what the U.S. Departmentof Health and Human Services projected as future costs. It is a good projection based on past increases of heatlh care costs.
yeah, that chart is basically saying that Health and Human services projected that health care costs in the u.s. will total 36.6 Trillion dollars through fiscal years 2009-2019
Here is the same HHS projection on the per capita data.
Here is how it compares with cost of living (CPI) expenses
How does this compare with wages??
past wages (median)
present wages (median)
what about future wages?
U.S. Wage Growth: The Downward Spiral
February 5, 2010
Wage Increases Expected to Stay Low
Average hourly earnings for all private-sector workers are up 2% over the past 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Large employers are expected to raise employee base salaries by a mere 2.5% this year, according to Hewitt Associates (HEW), the human resources consulting firm. That would be the second-lowest wage increase on record, with last year's 1.8% gain as the smallest ever. And to keep fixed costs down, companies are embracing variable pay plans, annual lump-sum bonus payments that don't get added to base salary. Some 90% of U.S. corporations have put in place a broad-based variable pay plan for everyone below the executive level, compared with less than 50% in the early 1990s.
"I wish I was casting a brighter future," says Ken Abosch, head of Hewitt's North American broad-based compensation consulting practice. "But it is what it is, and we might as well get used to it."
The long-term earnings picture deteriorates for many of those that have been laid off. In essence, research shows that a large number never recover from the financial loss. For example, after the deep recession of the early 1980s it took four to five years for overall wages to recover. Columbia University economist Till Marco von Wachter examined the experience of workers that had stable jobs going into the recession and were let go during the downturn. He calculates that the short-term wage loss was about 30% in the year immediately after getting a pink slip while the average long-term loss was 15%. To be sure, while 25% of laid-off workers did bounce back to the same wage level or better, the remainder were worse off. "There's nothing to suggest that today will be very different," says Wachter.
There's the rub. Nothing on the horizon suggests that a majority of workers will take home a bigger slice of the economic pie anytime soon. The bleak wage outlook and growing financial insecurity isn't a passing phenomenon reflecting the downward momentum of a recession and the fragility of the recovery. It's understandable that most people are worried about the parlous state of the job market, yet it will recover with time. The same can't be said for worker wages and family incomes. And that outlook is a long-term threat to America's prosperity.
So this is what we have to look forward to. The negoitiations that they have made have locked in the health care costs for a decade to come. The government will refuse to negotiate lower industry costs. They negotiated future price negotiations away in exchange for support for the political win of health insurance reform.
Just as a reminder, this is how U.S. health care costs per person compare with countries with socialized medicine.
Please watch this: it basically says it all.
The rate at which we are going to be paying is 35% more than what it is now, this is a hoax!
note yesterday's blog:
Health insurance reform is like pissing on the wall of a burning building
There is no indication yet as to how the Obama Administration is going to address the currently untenable costs of U.S. health care and how it is set to destroy the U.S. middle class. All current indications are that the U.S. federal government has already made an agreement with industry officials that they will not pursue direct intervention in market costs for the next 10 years.
It is up to you to show how their structural policies will prevent health care from bankrupting the middle class in the next 10 years.