What if Health Care Costs were treated like Gas Costs?

Last night we had our “book launch” for Public Health Business Planning here in Chapel Hill. It was a wonderful event, attended by the current cohort of Management Academy, some former students, the Dean of the UNC School of Public Health, faculty, friends, family, and colleagues from across the country. Thank you all for coming!

One conversation out of many sticks with me this morning. I was talking with one of my colleagues here at the NC Institute for Public Health who runs our Leadership Novant program, and we got talking about rising health care costs. It seems that so much attention has been paid to gas costs recently, but rising health care costs are affecting families, businesses, and communities at least as much as rising gas prices. According to a recent info sheet from the National Coalition on Health Care, national health expenditures on health care costs were $2.3 trillion in 2007. If that number is too vast to mean anything, think of this: the annual premium that a health insurer charges an employer for a health plan covering a family of four averaged $12,100 in 2007. Workers contributed nearly $3,300 toward that premium, or 10 percent more than they did in 2006. You can see that would be devastaing to a full-time minimum wage worker making $10,712, but even people making an average income are feeling the hit, for insurance that often covers less and less. An article in the Washington Post pointed out that even when costs are not directly passed on to employees, the increased prices are effectively lowering pay because employers cannot afford to give regular raises under these conditions.

It's not that the media are ignoring this problem, but it is not front and center the way gas prices are this summer. We mused, one of the reasons we think about gas prices so much is that we look at them all the time: at every corner gas station, there’s a huge sign showing today’s price per gallon. Every nightly news segment starts with a story about the price of gas and its effect on a family’s budget, tourism, the trucking industry, food prices… you name it. What if every corner had a sign saying what today’s price for a colonoscopy was, with flip-numbers ready to go up that next dime per procedure? “Get your colonoscopy today because tomorrow it might be doubled in price!” What if every news day started with a run down of the many things families are giving up because they have to pay such high health insurance premiums? Or, worse yet, how many more families are going without health insurance because they need to eat, pay rent and, yes, buy gas? What if the cost of not preventing flu, tooth decay, heart attacks, cancer were broken down into a per-person or per-illness figure and flashed before our eyes every time we went to the drug store? If every time we had to fill a prescription it was like filling a gas tank, putting one pill in at a time and watching a meter go up, we'd pay more attention!

Food for thought.

Anne Menkens