Health Care is killing us

I've written about health care a lot in this diary. It's something that I believe to be one of the most important problems we have to address in this country, health care costs are leading to the of the middle class. I have expertise in genomics which I believe will have a huge impact on health insurance and care costs and I have personal experience with health care costs and different systems..  Nationally, we already hit a milestone (not so good one) of health care costs that should be a warning.

Today I got another personally warning on how this is going to affect every one of us. Our family's health insurance is going up by 11.3% in January, 2006.

When we returned from Germany in 2002 we found the best health care we could at a reasonable price. I had a pre-existing condition of hypertension and we had an infant daughter.

It was Kaiser Permanente in CA. It cost us 428 dollars a month. That seemed steep, but some insurance companies wouldn't take us (my condition) and I was self-employed. So with a daughter, we had to get insurance.

This year it went up to 652 (after an increase the year before).

And today I received a letter saying the rate for 2006 will be 726.00/month.

That is 8,700 a year!  That is an 11.3% increase from this year.

that is a 70% increase in three years.

at this rate of increase, our health insurance costs will have doubled in less than 5 years.

There is little hope that most American families will be able to increase their wages by the same amount.

The time for universal health care is now.