If You Like Your Plan, You Can Keep It

It never made a lot of sense for anyone to think people could generally keep "their" plan, or even that a plan could be "yours" within this thing we have that passes for a health care system. It was all an illusion.

Health care costs in this country have been going up well above inflation for years for many reasons and within employer-covered care over the past 20 years, that increased cost-share looked like this, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation:


(Click to enlarge.)

The thing I note from that data is that the relative employee share has not increased notably, but that the rate of health care cost inflation is about 5.5 times the general rate of inflation (an increase of 295% for medical costs from 1999 to 2018 vs. 54% for  the cost of goods generally from 1997 to 2017).

As a result, many employers—even large employers—have trimmed back coverage and small employers no longer offer coverage. New employers don't even start, leaving employees to the exchanges or to self-insure, which wouldn't be so bad if we had a public option and/or the GOP hadn't done everything it could to gut the ACA.