Yep, my Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Illinois went up 43% in one year, and this was at a huge company where most of the employees are in their 20s and healthy. Complete insanity.

Mine went up 35%. I nearly had another heart attack when I got my first premium bill.

heh MonkeyButter. Some enterprising economist should make a graph out of the counter-productivity of raising bills too much.

A 28% increase and elimination of the $650 deductible. The minimum deductible in now $1600.

Cue health care industry bailout in two years.
2014 might not be perfect but anything doing a double digit price increase every quarter...Ugh.

Yeah, healthcare executives are probably already planning how to raid the vaults and jump ship before the regulators can make anything stick.

Health care reform hasn't gone far enough.

I've seriously considered dropping my health insurance coverage lately. $3k yearly in annual premiums, $2500 deductible, nothing is covered: prescriptions, copays, nothing. So why keep lining their pockets if I'm going to pay for everything anyway?

Letting health care stay privatized was insane. So it is a universal right for everyone to get health insurance, but we are also going to let these fucking vampires and leeches take a juicy cut?

The good thing about socialism is nobody has to make profit.

chewatadistance - because if you have to go to the ER, you are well and truly fucked. You're paying for the worst-case scenario, not the every day stuff.

$1800/m for a family of 3 here. And we had to form our own corporation just to get it in the first place.

Danny Westneat from the Seattle Times:

"The last column I wrote — about how some insurance CEOs are jacking up health premiums while waltzing off with fat year-end bonuses — sure had readers upset with me.

Not for being too hard on the CEOs. For being too soft.

"I don't know where you got the numbers you're reporting, but they're way too low," phoned Anneliese Whitney, 70, of Renton, in a typical call.

Whitney was ticked off that I cited the state insurance commissioner's office as saying health premiums went up on average 6 to 17 percent last year, depending on the plan or company.

"They should come out and look at my plan!" she shouted.

Her supplemental coverage to Medicare from Regence Blue Shield soared from a little more than $98 a month to $195 — a 98 percent boost.

She's hardly alone, I learned."

This whole issue has me baffled and near-incoherent with rage. As someone from a Canadian family full of doctors (and one paramedic), recently transplanted to the States, I really don't understand why there's even a debate about whether or not to have universal health care, let alone such poisonous, violent acrimony at the very idea. My grandfather practised medicine before and after medicare (and his father practised it before there was such a thing, accepting payment in chickens and such during the Depression), and there was never any doubt in Granddad's mind which was the better solution. The idea that a hospital should be primarily about profit was anathema to him. This clusterfuck just makes no sense to me at all, and the only explanation I can think of is that when people are so used to doing things one way, any other way is scary and incomprehensible. (Except in my case, because I'm right.) Given the tone of some of the arguments, it's clear that McCarthyism still shapes American political discourse, which I find much scarier than teh Socialism.

My company just dropped BC/BS after 20 years in favor of another insurer because the premium increase was too steep.

eLizard - yes, it's idiotic.

(though I don't really think it's McCarthyism at all - it's more the much older anti-Federalist, pro-rugged-individualist, gubmint-hatin' American streak, in combination with effective rhetoric from the business sector)

That's a good point. It's the hysteria surrounding the suggestion of socialism and the use of 'socialist' as an epithet, as well as the way the more mouth-frothy commentators equate socialism with communism, that makes me think of McCarthyism. I hadn't considered the longer history of anti-government sentiment here.

It's kind of an off-the-cuff observation, I admit - but I think the reason that "creeping Socialism" and "red menace" stuff has gone so far here and popped up so many times in history is this deeper strain of anti-collectivism, which tends to just poison so much political discourse in the US. And it goes back a long time, at least 100 years before we even had a nation going on here. And it's exhausting, weird, and regressive - yet it keeps insinuating itself into political discourse in a way that, at the bottom of it, is really anti-progressive.

Or, regressive.