Unhealthy healthcare: double squeeze

Last Wednesday, as part of my Unhealthy Healthcare series, I showed that the recent slowdown in U.S. healthcare costs has been invisible to American workers, because they have been forced to pay much higher premiums and deductibles in order to obtain access to healthcare for themselves and their families.

That conclusion has been confirmed by a recent Wall Street Journal article about the fact that workers are increasingly feeling the pain of paying for their healthcare.

Middle-class households are finding more of their health-care costs are coming out of their own pockets.

David Cutler, a Harvard health-care economist, said this may be “a story of three Americas.” One group, the rich, can afford health care easily. The poor can access public assistance. But for lower middle- to middle-income Americans, “the income struggles and the health-care struggles together are a really potent issue,” he said.

A June Brookings Institution study found middle-income households now devote the largest share of their spending to health care, 8.9%, a rise of more than three percentage points from 1984 to 2014.

By 2014, middle-income households’ health-care spending was 25% higher than what they were spending before the recession that began in 2007, even as spending fell for other “basic needs” such as food, housing, clothing and transportation, according to an analysis for The Wall Street Journal by Brookings senior fellow Diane Schanzenbach. These households cut back sharply on more discretionary categories like dining out and clothing.

While middle-income households are spending 25 percent more on health care, their real incomes actually fell 6.5 percent between 2007 and 2014, from $57,357 to $53,657.

Clearly, American workers are increasingly being squeezed by their employers at both ends—while they’re at work (since they’re working less and less time for themselves and more for their employers) and while they’re away from work (since they’ve been forced to assume a larger and larger share of the costs of their healthcare)