photo credit: stuartpilbrow

Recently the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust reported that health insurance premiums increased in cost more slowly this year compared to increases over the last ten years.

Is this good news, or just more bad news with a thin candy-coated shell? Unfortunately it’s tending more towards the latter case.

The Kaiser Family Foundation report indicated that the average premium went up by around five percent over 2008, contrary to recent trends in which health insurance costs have risen at a pace more rapid than that of both wages and inflation.

The flip is that even though the rate of premium hikes has slowed down a little, people are actually getting less coverage for their money.

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Healthcare and the issue of “entitlement” programs such as Medicare will likely become hot topics as the Presidential election looms closer but, really, this is relevant no matter where your political affiliations lie.

Medicare and Social Security aren’t subjected to the same budgetary processes as most other facets of government spending, and this may in the future force upon us something of a healthcare crisis.

However, it’s not what you might be thinking. This isn’t about the baby boomers expecting the younger generation to pay for Medicare via their tax dollars. Healthcare spending will indeed become a problem since the federal government is set to sink an estimated $54 trillion into senior healthcare over the next 75 years – which may make a $700 billion bailout look like pocket change – but it’s not necessarily due to the aging population.

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photo credit: Progress Ohio

If you’re in a position where you have to buy your own health insurance, you’re probably grumbling about it for many reasons, not the least of which is that you don’t enjoy the same tax breaks on health insurance that employer-subsidized insurance does.

When you’re lucky enough that your employer pays for your health insurance, every cent they contribute in health insurance premiums is 100% tax-free. Basically this means you enjoy the protection of health insurance at a discount, which you wouldn’t get if you were responsible for buying it yourself.

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The Kaiser Family Foundation released a closely followed report of annual health premium increases today, and found that premiums for individual employees rose at a slower pace than past years. This year, the average growth in premiums rose 5%, amounting to an average of $12,680 in total premium costs for a family.

However, according to Wall Street Journal, dig a little deeper and you’ll find that average premiums have a wide variation of 20% above and below the $12,680 mark, which suggests that employees would have a commensurate variance in levels of coverage.

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The US is considered to be the most expensive and least efficient of all the developed nations when it comes to health care costs. In a comparison between sick adults from the US, Canada, Britain, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, it was found that health care in the US is the most likely to result in patient out-of-pocket expenses and higher treatment or medical care error rates.

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