So what would happen if this country followed the Republicans preferred approach to health care: to leave the patchwork of for profit health care we now have to its own devices?
The Cost of Doing Nothing on Health Care
"People think if we do nothing, we will have what we have now," said Karen Davis, the president of the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health care research group in New York. "In fact, what we will have is a substantial deterioration in what we have."
Nearly every mainstream analysis calls for medical costs to continue to climb over the next decade, outpacing the growth in the overall economy and certainly increasing faster than the average paycheck. Those higher costs will translate into higher premiums, which will mean fewer individuals and businesses will be able to afford insurance coverage. More of everyone’s dollar will go to health care, and government programs like Medicare and Medicaid will struggle to find the money to operate.
Health Care costs will continue to escalate,
consuming ever larger shares of household budgets, as well as federal and state budgets. Letting health care continue to consume ever larger pieces of the American economy will become an increasingly unsustainable burden for the country to bear.
The higher premiums will also persuade more businesses, especially smaller ones, to decide not to offer insurance. More people who buy coverage on their own or are asked to pay a large share of premiums will find the price too high. It doesn’t take too many 39-percent increases, like the recent one proposed in California that has garnered so much attention, to put insurance out of reach.
Health Care will become more of a luxury available to a shrinking segment of the American population. Our health care system will be structured to cater to the needs of elite, priced out of reach for many who need it.
There will be a cost in lives, too. Mr. Pollack’s organization estimates that as many as 275,000 people will die prematurely over the next 10 years because they do not have insurance. Even people with insurance will find their coverage providing much less protection from financial catastrophe than it does now. Individuals will pay significantly more in deductibles and co-payments, for example. "More and more families will experience huge debts and bankruptcies," Mr. Pollack said.
More of the working poor and the lower middle class will die for lack of access to adequate health care. Many more will exhaust their life savings when illness strikes, and be forced to bankruptcy.
This harsh brutal future is what the demigods of the Republican Party would like to lock this country into, to conform to their rigid free market ideology that favors wealthy elites to the exclusion of everybody else.
Americans need to see past the scary talk of a Government takeover of 1/6 of the economy, and see the outlines of the bleak alternative the Republicans are offering to us for what it really is. The article points out how incremental reforms have produced little in the way of improvement over the last 15 years, and incremental reforms are unlikely to accomplish what is needed in the future.