Study: Employers to up Workers' share of Health Costs

Well, If you don't want health care reform (which is primarily the health care industry their mostly errand boys - The U.S. Congress) then better get ready for your expenses to skyrocket. And even if you want significant reform, your government won't do much for you. They've been bought off. America is controlled by lobbies. And Barack won't be able to change that. You have been abandoned.

Tens of thousands of U.S. workers face higher health insurance costs and reduced benefits next year, regardless of whether Congress passes health legislation, according to an annual survey released today.

The Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust found that nearly 40% of employers surveyed said they were likely to make their employees pay more for heath care, including higher deductibles and co-pays for doctor visits and prescriptions.

Premium increases have far outstripped wages and inflation, the survey found. During the past 10 years, employers' contributions jumped an average of 131% per worker. That's three times worker wages and four times general inflation, Kaiser said.

Some members of Congress haven't been bought off completely and are blowing the whistle on so-called health care reform:

This is a rather amazing public admission of something that most elected Democrats have kept to themselves, up until now: the growing concern that Obama will settle for anything and call it victory. From The Hill:

Rockefeller emerged from the Senate Democrats' weekly luncheon Tuesday afternoon, which featured an appearance by President Barack Obama's communications guru David Axelrod, wondering aloud (perhaps rhetorically) whether the White House's get-it-done message to Congress wasn't bold enough.

"David’s in there -- Axelrod -- saying we’ve got to try to get ‘something.’ So, the new benchmark is, ‘Well, if we can do something, if we can do anything, then we can say we did healthcare reform,’" Rockefeller said.

"Are we getting to the point where, if we do anything, we’ve achieved our purpose?" he said, less than an hour before announcing on a conference call with reporters that he would not vote to support the healthcare reform bill being drafted by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.).

Even news outlets that are sympathetic to health care reform are trashing the Democratic proposals:

By now you've probably heard about the draft bill submitted by Sen. Max Baucus. You may even have heard it's not a very good bill - for the American public, anyway. But it's a complex topic, and a complex bill (even though it has been written in relatively plain English and posted on the Web, to the Senator's credit).

So in order to clarify this complicated issue, here are the top five reasons why it's a really bad bill:[...]