Are increasing by 15-30% each year since the ACA became law.
I hear it everywhere and from everyone in the media.
I haven't heard a single article or report that questions that premise.
Even though health insurance costs are only increasing by single digit percentages, premiums have been increasing by double digit percentages.
I haven't heard a single reporter investigate this blatantly obvious disparity between cost and price.
And this doesn't even take into account the decreases in reimbursement costs for office visits, labs, imaging, pharmaceuticals etc. the insurance companies have been making every year.
Every year people continue to pay more and more on health care while receiving less and less in return. Each year physicians are getting paid less and less by insurance companies. Physicians can't have their own business because they don't have any control over the price of their services. People pay insurance companies a large amount of money, they dont want to pay a doctor as well, and they shouldn't have to.
Insurance companies control their customers and they control the medical industry. They not only have complete control over the price of their product but they set the prices on the services of the entire medical industry. Physicians have no say about the worth of their services. Individual physicians have no way to negotiate with these huge insurance corporations. In fact limiting the options of their customers has been a profitable strategy these insurances have invented and is increasing each year.
The ACA would never have become necessary if the insurance industry didn't have complete control over America's health care system's finances. Hopefully Americans will come to understand that insurance companies have no true purpose except to make a profit. And they are profiting because they set the prices of their product as well as the prices they pay for the services their product is contracted to provide.
Most physicians make less per year than people who sell group health insurance. And these sales people are paid to sell people the weakest product at the highest price. They are successful because they make these health insurance plans so complicated that very few people actually understand what they are buying.
The real travesty in this is that people even the healthy ones have come to expect and accept a rise in their insurance premiums every year instead of expecting the cost to decrease each year you remain healthy. Ignoring the fact that most of the increases in health care costs come from Medicare recipients, not from the private insurance population.
The health insurance has managed to convince everyone that premiums are no longer cumulative, they aren't an investment for your future, they aren't even a bargaining chip to use to negotiate next year's contract. It's as if they never existed. Like all contracts today, your past history means nothing when your contract is up. You can either sign another one or go somewhere else.
Annual contracts are the health insurances greatest achievement. Once your contract is up, your money is gone. The money you've spent is gone and has little or no negotiating power on another contract.
When did we give health insurance companies the power to choose the physician we see, determine their own prices and convince us all that a lifetime of insurance payments is not an investment in the future.