Controlling Health Care Costs

Timothy Noah writes in Slate about the crisis in health care:

Between 1999 and 2008, employer-sponsored health insurance premiums increased six times faster than wages. Average employer contributions to family health care plans more than doubled, and so did average worker contributions to those plans. Whatever pay increases the average worker received were wiped out, and then some, by the rapidly growing amounts deducted from his paycheck to cover health insurance. That's assuming he was lucky enough to be among the 59 percent of the U.S. population that received employment-based health insurance. (Fifteen percent have no health insurance at all. The other 26 percent either buy their own health insurance or get it through government programs like Medicare and Medicaid.) These calculations don't take into account the rising cost of actually using ever-pricier health coverage. During the same period, deductibles tripled. Health care costs have spiraled out of control.

That, in a nutshell, is why Congress and the Obama administration must enact health care reform.