Whose the Bully? Health Care or Reform?

Recently somebody told me that Health Care Reform has already raised healthcare costs in Massachusetts by more than a third! This statement, if accurate, demands Health Care Reform reform.

In our culter of soundbites and a habit of throwing around "facts" that we have not personally checked, I did some investigating.

In her Boston Globe article of August, 2009, Kay Lazar reported the following:

".. the average family premium for plans offered by employers in Massachusetts
was $13,788 in 2008, 40 percent higher than in 2003. Over the same period,
premiums nationwide rose an average of 33 percent."

Her citation is "a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a non-profit health care foundation".

As far as I can tell, however, we don't have sufficient data to create a definite
causal relationship between premium costs and the health care reform bill which did not
exist as law until the 2010-2011 year. Articles at the Commonwealth Fund seem to support the idea that Health Care Reform laws are causing us harm.

While I agree that more needs to be done, I disagree that the fact of a 33% average
premium cost increase between 2003 and 2008 is sufficient proof that both the baby
and the bath-water should be thrown out.

A stated goal of the "right of center" Commonwealth Foundation is "Challenging the general perception that government intervention is the most appropriate and most efficient means of solving societal problems."

Being concerned that their mission statement might hint of a bias, I continued to dig through to the Congressional Budget Office which provided numbers to both ex-Speaker Pelosi and the current Speaker, John Boehner.

At the CBO you can find the CBO's assessment of the effect of Health Care Reform on our personal wallets as well as on the national debt. Apparently, having analyze it twice, the CBO estimates that reform will save, on net, about $125 billion dollars whereas if it were repealed our debt would increase about $150 billion.

The CBO concedes that, if repealed, individually owned health care plan costs would go down. They explain that this is largely because without the reform, companies would not have to offer as broad a range of services as they do now. They estimate, however, that in the long run, 2012-2021, the cost of premiums obtained through employers would be higher without reform because of the subsidies and tax benefits included in the new laws, which a repeal would eliminate.

There is no question that without health care reform, fewer people in general would be able to have any health care at any price.

All this makes me wonder if there is not a bit of a "placating the bully" dynamic going on. If you don't bother a bully, he wont hit you and if you don't attempt to reform the system, big companies won't run up your bills as fast?

While it can be argued that both Industry and Government have, in turn and in concert played the bully, in this case, it really appears to me that healthcare reform is trying to control the bully, not encourage him. As usual we're getting knocked around a bit extra right now before we see any relief from this tuff.

---

Kay's article can be found in the Boston Globe archives at:

Bay State health insurance premiums highest in country - The Boston Globe

More current information on the subject of Health Care from the Commonwealth Foundation
can be found at: www.commonwealthfoundation.org

The Congressional Budget Office website is: http://www.cbo.gov/