Untangling the Knot of Health Care Coverage

Do you think you could provide for your family's heath care coverage with $1.77 million? According to this Atlantic Monthly piece, David Goldhill says that's how much you'll pay across your lifetime under our current dysfunctional system of health care coverage:

Let’s say you’re a 22-year-old single employee at my company today, starting out at a $30,000 annual salary. Let’s assume you’ll get married in six years, support two children for 20 years, retire at 65, and die at 80. Now let’s make a crazy assumption: insurance premiums, Medicare taxes and premiums, and out-of-pocket costs will grow no faster than your earnings—say, 3 percent a year. By the end of your working days, your annual salary will be up to $107,000. And over your lifetime, you and your employer together will have paid $1.77 million for your family’s health care. $1.77 million! And that’s only after assuming the taming of costs! In recent years, health-care costs have actually grown 2 to 3 percent faster than the economy. If that continues, your 22-year-old self is looking at an additional $2 million or so in expenses over your lifetime—roughly $4 million in total.

Yikes! But Goldhill, a Democrat, says the solution isn't to simply have the government take over: "Like its predecessors, the Obama administration treats additional government funding as a solution to unaffordable health care, rather than its cause. The current reform will likely expand our government’s already massive role in health-care decision-making—all just to continue the illusion that someone else is paying for our care."

Oh, you really need to take some time to read this Atlantic piece. (And I mean "take some time"--my printout ran to 17 pages.) Goldhill challenges us to "reexamine our basic assumptions about health care—what it actually is, how it’s financed, its accountability to patients, and finally its relationship to the eternal laws of supply and demand."