The Trump and Republican sabotage of the ACA played a role obviously in the high rate of medical inflation, but health care costs have been spiraling out of control since the 80s. Long before Obama and Trump.
Since 1980, health care in the US has gone from 9% of GDP up to 18% of GDP now. By comparison in every other western nation, it only increased 2-3%. Germany and Denmark were spending about 9% of GDP on health care in 1980 just like the US, now they are spending 11%.
If you use the rule of 72, a premium increase of 16-30% means prices will double within 2-4 years.
I don’t see how the system is sustainable. Also they aren’t rising in all fields of health care. In another thread someone was asking about dental discount plans. I looked into it, a filling or root canal in a dental discount plan is only about 15-30% more expensive than I was paying 15 years ago. That means dentistry costs are barely growing faster than inflation, not doubling every 3 years like health insurance costs. My eyeglasses if anything are cheaper than they were in the past.
I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer is. Well I do, the answer is massive reform, mandatory comparative effectiveness implementation and single payer followed up with a mandate that medical inflation has to be tied to within 1% of GDP inflation. But even in blue states they won’t touch that, they just pretend they’ll enact it.