WALTHAM — Despite more modest increases in recent years and a state push to hold down costs, the message from health insurance executives gathered here Thursday for a market outlook seminar was clear: Massachusetts health spending is heading up in 2013.
Representatives from the state’s nonprofit health plans as well as national for-profit insurers doing business in Massachusetts estimated the “medical cost trend,” a key industry measure, will climb between 6 and 12 percent this year — higher than last year’s cost bump and more than double the 3.6 percent increase set as a target in a state law passed last year.
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Health spending will continue to rise, every year into perpetuity! The Health Care Reform Bill did absolutely nothing to harness costs. Obama asked physicians, health insurance administrators, durable medical companies and pharmaceutical companies to come to Washington and write the plan, more than 2,300 pages.
Demographic shifts as a prime contributor to increasing health care spending is conspicuously absent from this particular discussion. Why is this not the first item on the list? What is the salary level of the insurance executives who are manipulating jargon about migration to limited networks? That "migration" is usually the result of mafia-like tactics where, figuratively speaking, knees are broken unless the provider signs up with the network. Those insurance execs are intent on forcing health care providers to work harder, have more expertise, and take on more clinical risk than they do in their positions, with the upper management, at least, making handsome salaries for their business hardball activites that are significantly higher than many of the clincians who are actually contributing to people's health care.