Health Care Costs Hurting companies
November 24, 2009
NaturalNews
by David Gutierrez
Businesses in the United States are expected to spend 9 percent more on health care in 2010 than they did in 2009, according to an annual survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
According to previous surveys, the cost of health care increased by 9.9 percent between 2007 and 2008, then another 9.2 percent between 2008 and 2009.
The economic recession has contributed to the projected increase in health care costs in two ways. First, workers nervous about the possibility of being laid off have began using their health plans more heavily, out of fear of becoming uninsured. Unemployment has also affected health insurance costs by driving increasing numbers of people to public insurance programs such as Medicaid. This has built a significant blow to the profits of private insurers, who have responded by raising the rates that employers are expected to pay.
Employers, in turn, pass costs along to their employees. Forty-two percent of employers surveyed said that they planned to increase employees’ premiums, while 41 percent said that they planned to share increasing costs with their workers by changing their coverage plans. Twenty percent said that they planned to implement high-deductible health plans within the next two years.
The survey found that the number of people in high-deductible plans has been increasing, leading directly to lower use of medical services because people can simply no longer afford them.
More than two-thirds of employers in the survey said that they offered wellness or disease-management programs intended to reduce health care costs, although they did not find them very effective at cost reduction. Forty percent of employees said they were enrolled in wellness programs, while 15 percent were enrolled in disease-management programs
Not all factors are pushing costs up, however. Even if no health care reform plan is implemented, the patents on five blockbuster drugs are said to expire in 2010, while even more are set to enter the public domain in the following two years.
U.S. Senate Health Committee Passes Health Care Reform Bill that will Bankrupt America
July 16, 2009 by Brandy
Filed under Government
July 16, 2009
Natural News
by Mike Adams
The great lumbering health care reform gears are in motion in Washington D.C., and the Big Government machine is spitting out a new recipe for the bankruptcy of America: A “health care reform” bill that pleases all the special interest groups and pharmaceutical companies but does nothing to improve the health of ordinary Americans.
Health care reform in Washington today isn’t about health, or reform. It’s about mandating monopoly-priced western medicine for the masses. It’s about fining people who wisely opt out of the criminally-operated health insurance industry, and it’s designed to keep the American people sick and diseased while emptying their pockets of any remaining earnings they might have somehow squirreled away during the ongoing financial / real estate crash.
For starters, this Senate health reform bill would financially penalize people who take care of their own health and choose not to hand over $1,000 or month (or more) to a corrupt, criminally-operated health insurance system. This is a bill that actually punishes people for staying healthy! At the same time, it just happens to expand the monopoly of western medicine to encompass the entire U.S. population, criminalizing those who have opted out of the failed health care system.
The other joke in this health care reform is the idea of a new government-run health plan, which is being hilariously presented as a way to “drive down costs.”
Since when has Big Government ever been able to drive down the costs of anything? It was Big Government, under the Bush administration, that actually made it illegal for government to negotiate price discounts with drug companies, locking in monopoly prices that filled the coffers of Big Pharma while bankrupting the taxpayers.
Even now, the FDA (under the Obama administration) continues its outright war against the natural products industry, censoring truthful information about the health benefits of dietary supplements in a tyrannical effort to eliminate Big Pharma’s competition. This has the effect of eliminating choice for consumers, ultimately driving up monopoly health care costs under the system of western medicine that (laughingly) claims to provide health care today.
Click here for the full article from naturalnews.com
