AMERICAN HEALTH CARE SHAFT

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Drug costs rising twice as fast as inflation

"We are disappointed that brand name manufacturers have failed to keep their price increases in line with inflation despite consumer appeals for them to hold the line," AARP chief Bill Novelli said in a statement. "Much more needs to be done to slow down spiraling drug pricing."

The 7.1 percent hike, slightly higher than 2003's 7.0 percent jump, continues a trend of increasing drug prices. Since the end of 1999, prices of more than 150 popular name-brand drugs have risen an average 35.1 percent, nearly three times the 13.5 percent inflation rate over that period, the report said. In 2004, inflation was 2.7 percent in 2004.

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Note that the rate of price increase over inflation is cumulative in nature. That is, drugs are not only becoming more expensive than everything else, year by year they're becoming waaay more expensive than everything else. This has very real consequences in people's lives--indeed, my failed experiment of becoming a high school teacher was all about getting good prescription insurance; alas, the cure was worse than the disease, and now I pay out of pocket for my daily meds. Good thing my folks are helping me out with expenses while I'm back in school. Of course, most Americans don't have well-to-do bourgeois parents to mooch from, and they're essentially shit out of luck. Obviously, that's unjust. Unfortunately, there is no help on the horizon, as this new Paul Krugman essay from the New York Times via the Houston Chronicle illustrates:

Health care crisis is real, also politically inconvenient

Those of us who accuse the administration of inventing a Social Security crisis are often accused, in return, of do-nothingism, of refusing to face up to the nation's problems. I plead not guilty: America does face a real crisis — but it's in health care, not Social Security.

Well-informed business executives agree. A recent survey of chief financial officers at major corporations found that 65 percent regard immediate action on health care costs as "very important." Only 31 percent said the same about Social Security reform.

But serious health care reform isn't on the table, and in the current political climate it probably can't be. You see, the health care crisis is ideologically inconvenient.

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And, as the essay later shows, it's ideologically inconvenient because the only solutions that actually have any chance of working defy the fundamentalism of the free market. That is, government must take over the health care system, but Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, simply cannot stomach the thought. All they can offer are half-baked bullshit plans about "medical savings accounts," or "managed competition." It's all bullshit, but our leaders are neck deep in it: they don't even understand reality anymore. Meanwhile, people you know are sick or injured or in debt because of medical bills.

"Promote the general welfare," my ass.

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