If you’ve been billed for medical costs in recent years, you might well have been outraged at the amounts charged and the lack of explanation about your bill. If you’re lucky, your health insurance provider negotiated a discount, but chances are your deductible and co-pay amounts have climbed in recent years so that you got stuck with a big, probably unexpected, expense.
Despite all the rhetoric and legislation in Washington, costs keep climbing. The politicians seem much more interested in who should pay the skyrocketing costs than in finding fixes to keep the costs from escalating even more.
Warren Buffett recently pointed out that we’ve let American health care costs climb from 5% of GDP fifty years ago to over 17% today. To put that into perspective, the World Bank says the worldwide average was 9.9% in 2014. Germany spends 11.3% of their GDP on health care, Japan is 10.2%, Britain’s costs are 9.1% and China is at 5.5%. Just the excess that the US spends vs. the global average is over $1.4 trillion per year (or about $4,200 per person).
You can write your Congressmen and ask that they refocus on reform vs. determining who pays for it. But you can also learn more about the issues and how to try to reduce your health care bills. A new book came out a few weeks ago called An American Sickness with the tag line How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back. It’s written by Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and former doctor.
If you aren’t already disgusted by the state of our healthcare system, then you will be by the time you finish the first part of the book. It outlines how our systems work today and their history. The second part offers concrete suggestions on how to reduce your health care costs and fight back against the insane bills.
The book should be required reading for any American citizen and voter. But it could also save you thousands of dollars in absurd health care costs.
