So I was piddling around on the government’s endless statistical sites messing with something that’s just been nagging at me. They use the gdp [gross domestic product] to correct some things and the cpi-u [consumer price index – urban] to correct others. As I’ve been messing with matters econimic, I’ve wondered about their relationship, so I plotted them. Well they’re not parallel but after musing and surfing on this weighty question, I decided that it’s in the range of changing lead to gold and put it aside. But in the process, I noticed something that did seem to matter. There was a cpi-u for medical costs. Like the regular cpi-u, it was normalized to 1984 = 100, so I wondered how the medical cost of living compared to the general cost of living. 
Yikes! To my way of thinking, that’s pretty outrageous. Those lines are diverging at a rate of a bit over 6%/year. I threw in a comparable US life expectancy curve for the curious among you [though I’m not sure that the small increases in longevity are a function of the higher costs of medical care]. To me, this escalation of Medical Costs at a rate far faster than inflation underscores the importance of the Healthcare legislation passed in this Administration.
We have a lot to think about in terms of Healthcare and the related programs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicade. I’m not sure that the package that passed is the best we can do, but at least it’s a start.
The Republicans want none of the above, so it’s really hard to get a bead about how best to implement these programs because in the current political climate, they are all spoken of contemptuously as "entitlement" programs. They are a lot more than that. They are necessary cost containment programs too. These blue lines just can’t keep going…
If you look at the bigger, long-range picture, our economy cannot sustain the increase in health care costs — no matter who pays for it.
Partly it’s a function of more and more (and more expensive) treatments that weren’t available even 5 years ago. And partly it’s a function of obscene profits for the drug and health care device manufacturers.
I don’t pay for it — Medicare and my supplemental policy do — but just a small replacement plastic nose piece for my CPAP machine, which I would guess costs about one dollar to make, costs about $75.
In contrast, my Rx medicines seems to be going down — under a Medicare Plan D policy. For one, I now have them all as generics, but for some I get a 90 day supply for less than $10. I assume this is the result of bargaining with the drug companies by my insurance and CVS.
That’s my point. Those negotiations occur because of your Medicare. The only antedote to Rx Company/Device/Doctor profiteering is to have an Agency to do just that. As individuals, we’re at their mercy…
A 1 month supply of 1 drug my spouse needs to take every day costs $10,000 for his illness.
Joy,
That’s outrageous…