A colleague of mine, Jennifer Devoe, MD, PhD from the Oregon Health Sciences University, and I had a paper published in the Annals of Family Medicine this week. We basically found that the recession and recent slowdown of health insurance premium inflation pushes out the point that the cost of a family health insurance premium equals median household income to 2033 (compared to 2025 in an earlier estimate). Even under optimistic assumptions of the impact of the Affordable Care Act on healthcare costs, this crossing point is only delayed by four years.

This article has been commented on by HealthDay, CNN, and the Huffington Post, links below. We’re pleased that some media outlets have taken an interest, but we hope more that the country will wake up and finally have a meaningful discussion of how much it wants to pay for healthcare, and the difficult choices we must make to actually break the cost curve if Americans want to have less of their resources go to the healthcare industry and more into their personal pockets.

http://consumer.healthday.com/Article.asp?AID=662670

http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/14/health-care-costs-to-surpass-total-income/#comments

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/13/health-care-costs-affordability_n_1341717.html?ref=business

This entry was posted on March 14, 2012 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.