An Epidemic of Health Care Costs
January 24, 2004
If the cost of a favorite food or gasoline or your rent increased 14.7 percent in a year, Americans would switch brands, or take more public transportation, or move. If Congress raised taxes by 14.7 percent, I bet the 535 men and women serving in Congress would be looking for different work in November.
But what happens when the average cost of health care plans increases by 14.7 percent in a year?
The first three scenarios have reasonable alternatives, but in 2003, the average price of insurance experienced its greatest jump in nearly 15 years - 14.7 percent.
In his State of the Union address last week, President Bush identified the rising costs of medical care and health insurance as the major challenge facing our American health care system.
If employers cannot afford to offer medical insurance to their employees, or if the costs of medical care far exceed what working Americans and retirees can afford alone, then the entire system will have failed. When Americans cannot afford their health care system, few alternatives exist for them. Continued cost increases of this magnitude threaten to undermine the services Americans depend upon for their health.
The role of currently uninsured Americans should not be ignored in this debate, either. As the prices of insurance and health care rise, even more Americans join the ranks of nearly 44 million uninsured, 550,000 of them here in Missouri. Once uninsured, they do not get preventative screenings or make regular visits to their doctor. When they do get sick, uninsured Americans are more likely to end up in the emergency room than in the doctor's office.
What can we do to keep prices reasonable and help Americans retain their health care coverage?
Those who are familiar with my stance on health care issues know I believe in two general solutions. The first is to enable small business to band together and purchase health insurance for their employees as a group. These Association Health Plans (AHPs) would drastically reduce the price of insurance, benefitting the millions of uninsured Americans who work for businesses with fewer than a dozen employees.
The second solution is to reduce the unreasonably high price of prescription drugs. The prescription drug benefit passed by Congress last year does not go nearly far enough for American senior citizens. Indeed the major reason that health care costs are skyrocketing for all Americans is the escalating costs of prescription drugs.
By forcing manufacturers in the U.S. to compete with the prices they give foreign customers on the same product, we could save Americans hundreds of millions of dollars at their pharmacies. This would lower healthcare costs for all Americans. Greater access to low-cost generic drugs, and better information about which generics work for which patients would enhance additional savings.
Just this week in the House of Representatives, Congressman Dennis Moore and I introduced a new piece of legislation on Medicare. Our proposal would enable the federal government to negotiate prices for prescription drugs on behalf of the 40 million beneficiaries in the Medicare system.
As surprising as it is, the federal government, using your tax dollars, does not get any kind of discount for buying medication in quantity through Medicare. This policy is more than bad business, it is downright wasteful. When you also consider that the costs of these prescription drugs steadily increase from year to year - you realize that this policy gets more expensive the longer we allow drug companies to take advantage of the system.
Public outcry should be just as great over huge increases in health care costs as it is for exuberant tax hikes and skyrocketing prices at the gas pump. All too often, these inflated costs grab headlines while skyrocketing health care costs slowly become accepted as a fact of life.
Health care is a complex subject, there are many stakeholders in the issue. Just as in proper medical care, we must treat the disease - not just the symptoms.
There is much the federal government can do to remedy this crisis for senior citizens, uninsured Americans, and those stricken with catastrophic illnesses and the catastrophic costs that accompany them. I look forward to working with the president and my colleagues to improve access to healthcare and to lower its costs to all of us.