The Affordable Care Act, helping Americans curb health-care costs
By Kathleen Sebelius,
The rising cost of health insurance coverage has imposed a heavy burden on our nation. Over the past decade,insurance premiums for working families have grown three times faster than have wages. Small businesses have seen health care become one of their biggest operating expenses. And rising state and federal spending on health programs has crowded out critical investments in better schools, new roads and other areas.
If health-care costs continue to rise unchecked, they will threaten America’s ability to compete and will become unaffordable for most families. One of the major reasons we passed the Affordable Care Act was to bring down costs, something the health-care law does in three ways: by increasing insurance-market competition, assisting those who can’t afford coverage, and tackling the underlying cost of medical care.
latimes.com
Survey shows California healthcare costs rising, benefits shrinking
By Marc Lifsher, Los Angeles Times5:22 PM PST, January 4, 2012
Reporting from Sacramento
http://www.latimes.com/health/healthcare/la-fi-california-health-care-costs-20120105,0,4040230,print.story
Insurers Profit From Health Law They Spent Millions to Fight
By - Jan 5, 2012
Insurance companies spent millions of dollars trying to defeat the U.S. health-care overhaul, saying it would raise costs and disrupt coverage. Instead, profit margins at the companies widened to levels not seen since before the recession, a Bloomberg Government study shows.
Insurers led by WellPoint Inc. (WLP), the biggest by membership, recorded their highest combined quarterly net income of the past decade after the law was signed in 2010, said Peter Gosselin, the study author and senior health-care analyst for Bloomberg Government. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Managed Health-Care Index rose 36 percent in the period, four times more than the S&P 500.
“The industry that was the loudest, most persistent critic of this law, the industry whose analysts and executives predicted it would suffer immensely because of the law, has thrived,” Gosselin said. “There is a shift to government work under way that is going to represent a fundamental change in their business model.”
High-deductible health plans on rise
More workers will have to pay higher deductibles before their health benefits kick in next year — and insurance experts say that soon will become the norm.Corporate employers, small businesses and nonprofit organizations are increasingly requiring their workers to spend between $1,200 and $5,000 before filing a health insurance claim.
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111227/NEWS07/312270017/High-deductible-health-plans-rise
Maine Voices: For health care improvements in Maine, the disagreement is in the how
A column by state Rep. Deborah Sanderson doesn't represent the best solution for costs, needs.
By SUSAN HENDERSON
SOUTH PORTLAND - As a registered nurse with over 45 years experience in health care, I would like to respond to Rep. Deborah Sanderson's statements in Maine Voices, Dec. 30, 2011 ("Legislature is tackling the causes of Maine's high health care costs").
Rep. Sanderson lists three reasons why health insurance costs in Maine are high compared to much of the nation.
She identifies high cost of care in Maine, a large medical welfare population and restrictive health insurance laws.
She states that the Legislature is working to resolve these three and other related issues. Probably almost everyone can agree that health care costs need to be reduced.
Government: The redistributionist behemoth
By George F. Will,
Liberals have a rendezvous with regret. Their largest achievement is today’s redistributionist government. But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.
Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage.
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