What do you see happening to your healthcare costs in the next few years
 

What do you see happening to healthcare
Will costs go down or up?
What could anyone do to solve the problem?

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtoo...-forecast.aspx

I don't think Trump has a clue what he's doing. He's looking for an attaboy at his last campaign stop without any understanding how a system works. The lack of the individual mandate is going to send costs skyrocketing.

Someone said on the news this morning, Trump sure knows how to break things but he doesn't know how to fix anything.

Spence
I was kinda hoping this could not be about Trump or Obama, but about healthcare given where we are at and where people think we could or should go in their perfect world.
It could be a Libertarian world, Progressive, Authoritarian or whatever your little or large heart desires.

I think they will always continue to rise. If you can afford it you'll have more choices to purchase the health care plan you prefer from who you want. Hopefully in the future the choice of plans will expand and allow out of state purchase.

Med trend will average about 6.5% and RX trend will average about 11.3%.

until it changes back to a non profit model ... its going to go up its not about taking care of Americans its about making money and if your priced out the usual suspects will blame the sick person not the system.. or you hope to make it 65 where your insurance will bounce you back to the government because you cost to much ...

Define "profit." Then tell us when health care here was non profit.

He knew how to fix Hilary’s inevitability.
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That’s about right Paul.

We need some kind of pooling of risk to get healthy people into the system, for damn sure we need tort reform, not sure what else can help. This is the downside of increased life expectancy, combined with the demographic effect of the baby boomers. We will have huge numbers if old people, who can live into their late 90s but will need care and expensive drugs. Going to be a massive problem, no easy solution.
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Profit margins among health insurers are around 6-7%. Not a big deal. Seeking profit provides a good incentive to avoid expensive waste, something that the public sector could stand a lesson on.
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We had that, it was called the individual mandate, it was a Republican idea. Trump repealed it because it was passed under Obama.
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Except it didn’t work. So we didn’t really have it. Too many opted out. We increased coverage, covered more people, covered more health events for more people, but didn’t get sufficient numbers of healthy people.

I have a liberal view on this. No one chooses to be born healthy, no one chooses to be born with lifelong health issues, so the proper thing is to pool the risk. We’re all in that together. No one should struggle financially for their entire life because they were born with a terrible illness. It’s bull#^&#^&#^&#^&.
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That's just not true. Numbers of uninsured plummeted to historic lows and near the CBO estimates. The issues had more to do with Republican led states denying the exchanges and more recently Trump gutting Federal funding. In states where it was embraced it was actually working nearly according to plan. Not perfect but heading in the right direction.

you are like a wind-up toy :boots:

"That's just not true."

Yes it is true. Costs skyrocketed because not enough healthy young people signed up. Sick people signed up in huge numbers, healthy people paid the fine and self-insured. That's why it failed miserably.

That is profit not including the costs that physicians incur to count beans for insurance companies. When my brother closed his practice he had himself, a nurse practitioner, several rns and 6 people dealing with paperwork. Now the 6 people dealing with paperwork do not improve healthcare outcomes, and they are a cost.
Shuffling paper and counting beans makes insurance companies money 6-7% of all the paper they shuffle, and beans they count.

I setup and fix those medical / practice management systems and the continual changes and updates that must be applied just for regulatory changes cost thousands per year at the practice level. Would be good to simplify that small cost of a business. There are a lot of hoops the practice runs thru just to formulate the paperwork to the INS co's whims and desire.

Jim, you're just making thing up again. Uninsured among young adults dropped more than any other age group. Of course with Trump's changes this could change dramatically.

Makes a lot of sense to break something people depend on without any alternate plan.

Yes, numbers of uninsured dropped. Problem was, sick people had huge incentives to join, and healthy people had incentives not to join. That's why the math didn't work. Too many healthy people were better off paying the fine/penalty, rather than enrolling.

If it worked as swimmingly as you suggest, why did costs skyrocket? The ACA got a lot more people insured, sure. But the pooling of risk between healthy people and sick people, wasn't nearly sufficient. You can't prove that wrong by pointing out how many people signed up. The problem wasn't that too few signed up, the problem was too few healthy people signed up.

I think we need a system where the young/healthy people cannot opt out. We need their money to help pay for people who are sick through no fault of their own. The ACA attempted to do this. It gave an easy out to the healthy.

You're making thing up again. Costs didn't skyrocket in fact the rate of increase slowed as was expected.

You're right, people in the exchanges didn't see triple digit increases, I'm making it up. Companies didn't drop out of Obamacare when they realized they couldn't avoid big losses, nope, I made that up too.

"the rate of increase slowed as was expected"

Now who is making stuff up? Obama didn't sell this by saying "the rate of increase will slow", he said the typical family would save $2500 a year. Didn't happen. Not until the tax overhaul , that is.

The $2500 figure was a calculation around total savings. He may have misspoke by attributing it to premiums but was likely just reciting a talking point that wasn't clear.

Regardless, under the health care act actual savings have been estimated at closer to $3300 besting even the original $2500 mark.

Maybe we need to start electing CPAs instead of Lawyers, just a thought.
I would like to see a totally funded basic healthcare system that did primary care and the things we all need to live a reasonable life. You could also buy additional insurance to do things above and beyond what is available in the basic system.
How it is totally funded is a big question.
The other one is what is basic care and who decides that.
The way it currently works seems to me to be, people on government assistance get it paid for, the truly wealthy can just pay for it, the people in the middle are fine as long as they dont get a long term issue and lose their coverage because they cannot work or happen to get sick while for one reason or another they are uninsured. Of course most people in this country fall into the middle group.

Sure, the average family is seeing price decreases for comparable coverage. Right. Price savings that exceed the $2,500 estimate, because as usual, Obama under-estimated his own brilliance.

My insurance company doesn't sell health insurance, but we sell liability insurance to companies that sell health insurance. Costs are up, not down. You don't cover more people, and cover more health-related risks like pre-existing conditions, while seeing costs decrease. I'm not making that up, that's arithmetic.

"Maybe we need to start electing CPAs instead of Lawyers, just a thought"

A brilliant thought. Sincerely, boy that would help.

The savings is net. If costs are estimated to rise 5 thousand and they only rise 2-1/2 thousand you would see a savings even though costs are still increasing.

That sounds like the same logic my wife uses when she says she “Saved” us money when she bought chit we didn’t need because it was “ On Sale”
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That is exactly what he's saying. And it's as absurd in the case of healthcare, as it is when the missus says it.

Only if you didn't need the health care.

A bunch of data collected by various organizations about healthcare in the world' and yes, you should always take things with a grain of salt. So, don't get locked into the one that agrees with your philosophy, but feel free to contribute.
I saw this nugget in one of them, not sure how the math was done: Even though the U.S. is the only country without a publicly financed universal health system, it still spends more public dollars on health care than all but two of the other countries.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/...lth-u-s-spends
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publ...al-perspective
https://www.forbes.com/sites/physici.../#613a591d1232