Healthcare up another 10%

Lovely news today from the Globe - health insurance premiums are expected to rise on average 10% again this year.

This, along with education costs are the two areas that I believe cannot sustain themselves long term. Ask yourself this - do you get 10% better service and benefits than you did last year from your health care provider? I don't know many that do. (You could say the same about the school budget by the way). More likely is that the uninsured costs are rising and we the taxpayers and policy holders make up the difference. How legislators expect we can support illegal aliens under this system I have no idea.

According to this story, premiums are rising way faster than wages and the gap between the increase in wages and premiums is at its widest point in 6 years.

The other thing this affects as far as town government is so-called "fixed cost" agreements where the health care is included to a large degree in contracts and those employed by government. Generally public sector workers in Massachusetts pay a lower percentage of the premium costs than dreaded private sector workers do. So this means that increasingly, the taxpayers pick up the extra bennies government workers demand and legislators give into.

Something else to think about - according to this article, up to 60% of health care spending is tax-financed. So essentially we the tax payers are paying a huge percentage of health care insurance costs already. And here I thought we had a free market insurance system.

What's driving the increased costs you'd have to ask an expert and they disagree. But it's something to consider for the budget minded, including our town officials.