Economic Recovery Needs To Include Health Insurance Reform
Tuesday Sep 30, 2008Economic Recovery Needs To Include Health Insurance Reform in Individual Health Insurance
In
a thoughtful piece in the Detroit Free Press by Marianne
Udow-Phillips, the director of the Center for Health Care Research and Transformation
in Michigan, she argues that any economic recovery should include financial
reform for health insurance.
Udow-Phillips points out national health care spending totals over 16% of the United States gross domestic product — or over $2 trillion.
Even more, we spend more per capita on health care than any other industrialized country by a wide margin.
And though we spend literally tons of money on health care, we still have in the neighborhood of 45 million Americans living without any health insurance.
So how does a high uninsured rate affect our economy?
Here are a few points from Udow-Phillips’ piece:
- Workers with out health insurance are less healthy. Unhealthy workers equal unhealthy business
- Uninsured Americans increase overall health care costs when they wait until their health conditions requires the emergency room
- American firms are less competitive to attract workers on the global market
It seems silly that an economic recovery wouldn’t include health insurance reform, right?


Posted by forHealth on October 01, 2008 at 08:18 AM CDT #
We spend more on healthcare per capita than any other industrialized country. Can it be said that we have better access to healthcare than any other industrialized nation? People with insurance probably would say yes. So, how do we accommodate the people without insurance?
What has to happen is that people need to start having more visibility into what healthcare costs. If you are reading this, how much does the hospital charge to fix a broken leg? What about to take care of pneumonia? Everyone just wants to pay their $20 and go to the doctor. If people knew that hospital #1 is 5 times the cost, but provides 5 times the service, it would be up to them to figure out where they want to go and how much to pay.
Until people are concerned for the price of their individual care instead of waiting for it to just be "covered", we will always have the problem of costly healthcare that is difficult to obtain for the less fortunate that are uninsured.
Posted by Ben on October 02, 2008 at 10:41 AM CDT #