There's a reason health care remains at the top of voters' list of issues as they consider this midterm election. Actually, a lot of reasons, starting with the fact that Republicans continue to be most committed to taking whatever good things have happened with their health insurance away. Add to it the fact that the governing Republican party has proven utterly incapable of coming up with any kind of healthcare policy that would be beneficial. Pile on top of that the fact that, even with the protections provided under the Affordable Care Act, there are still serious problems in the system and the affordable part is totally slipping away.
When Carla Jordan and her husband were hit with a cascade of serious medical issues, she knew that at least her family had health insurance through her job. What she didn’t realize was that even with that coverage, a constant stream of medical bills would soon push the family to the edge of financial collapse.
Long story short, the Jordans have been forced into declaring bankruptcy over medical bills twice in four years. She had insurance, but the out-of-pocket increases she's been forced to pay out of a salary that hasn't increased. His carpentry business has never recovered from the great recession. On $79,000 a year they are living paycheck-to-paycheck. It's a vicious cycle that began, largely, when Republicans were last in and passed a massive tax cuts bill. The 2003 Bush tax cuts included a provision encouraging employers to embrace high-deductible plans, requiring employees to pay much larger out-of-pocket expenses. That system was baked in by the time Obamacare was passed, and the high-deductible plan became a cornerstone of "affordable" coverage—keeping monthly premiums down.
But health insurers weren't going to miss out on any profit while beneficiaries picked up more of the tab themselves, and insurance costs on both the employer and individual markets have steadily increased. Instead of increasing employees' salaries, employers are paying more in benefits and turning to high-deductible options to try to keep costs down and employees are paying more and more on their own. It's a vicious cycle, ending up with people who have insurance having to decide whether to pay the mortgage or fill their prescriptions.
Please give $1 to our Senate and House funds so that Republicans pay the price for sabotaging our health care.
When one large employer switched all its employees to high-deductible plans, medical spending dropped by 12 percent to 14 percent, according to an analysis by economists at University of California, Berkeley and Harvard. But the workers weren’t learning to shop more effectively for health care. They simply reduced the amount of medical care they used, including preventative care.
You want to know how bad it's gotten? Read this: "We all thought high deductibles are going to drive people to get involved—‘skin in the game,’ Jamie Dimon, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan, said in early June. Instead, 'they didn't get the surgery they needed, when they needed it, because they can't afford the high deductible in one shot.'" Jamie fucking Dimon is questioning the philosophy of making people put "skin in the game." For his employees, anyway.
Does that mean Dimon will come 'round to embracing the only proven solution to the profit-making problem in American health care—single payer? Of course not. "Dimon has teamed up with the top executives of Amazon.com Inc. and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. to improve the health care they provide for their workers." For. Their. Workers. Maybe it'll be a model every other Fortune 500 company with billionaire owners can bestow upon their employers. But it's not going to fix this mess.
The only thing that's going to fix any of this is a new Congress and then a new president. Now that Democrats have come around to the idea that running on fixing health care is a good idea, and that Medicare for all is turning out to be an even better one, it's a start.