UTTERLY PATHETIC.

More folly from the self-styled progressives.  "‘Utterly Unsustainable’: Employer-Sponsored Healthcare Costs Set to Keep Surging."  Search the essay in vain for any acknowledgement that such "healthcare costs" have nothing to do with trade-tested betterments.  You get the usual talking points.  "While Democratic leadership continues to oppose a Medicare for All system overwhelmingly favored by their party’s voters, progressives point to studies showing that such a program will save lives and money."

Nowhere in the essay do we see any evidence of such studies, although we see a variation on the pretty pig problem.

US workers with employer-sponsored health insurance are expected to spend an average of $5,297 on healthcare this year, including premiums deducted from their paychecks, deductibles, and copayments, according to a new estimate from benefits consulting giant Aon reported Thursday by The Wall Street Journal.

That’s $388 more than last year, and the pain is expected to intensify in 2027. According to a survey conducted by WTW, another consultant, US employers anticipate their healthcare costs will soar 11.1% next year. That could be the steepest increase in more than two decades, and would mark the fifth consecutive year of rising employer healthcare costs.

As the Journal noted, expensive cancer treatments and widespread adoption of weight loss drugs are among the factors driving up spending—and costs. For workers, that means larger deductions from their paychecks, higher out-of-pocket costs, and, for some, abandoning insurance altogether.

“Employers are telling us that this is utterly unsustainable,” WTW population health leader Jeff Levin-Scherz told the Journal.

A new academic year is about to begin, and it is time for a review session.

We'll know improvements are on the way when the conversation turns away from the current focus on insurance and liability, and begins to treat the practitioners and the producers of medicines and medical tools as entrepreneurs and innovators rather than as cost curves to be bent down or as devices to be taxed.

We'll know improvements are on the way when the conversation goes beyond argumentum ad misericordiam.  "You May Like Obamacare, But Don’t Forget About The People It Has Hurt," and the stories of people who benefit from their subsidized insurance, don't get to the main challenge, which is ... expanding the set of important operations people can perform without having to think about them.

That expanded set of operations might include not having to plan your entire week around daily cancer treatments because the "expensive cancer treatments" are sometimes more convenient, or deferring or cancelling future treatments for arthritis or other co-morbidities thanks to those weight loss drugs.  That requires too much thought for Common Dreams types, who, predictably, trot out the misericordiam (sob stories, for those of you in Rio Linda.)

Medical care involves the allocation of scarce resources among competing uses, and it is convenient to pretend that when you allocate them by politics, you no longer allocate them using prices and markets, which might fool some people who no longer see the Blue Cross or United Health deductions on their pay stubs, but are they paying attention to how much higher their Medicare withholding will be, particularly if their monthly gross income makes them liable for the so-called "Income-Related Monetary Adjustment Amount."

Go ahead, pretend everything is fine.  The so-called Medicare trust fund is in parlous shape, and the reimbursement rate does for practitioners what Wal-Mart does to vendors.

Moreover, if you can't ration by price and you can't squeeze the high income premium payers hard enough, Someone In Authority has to make hard decisions.  "With calls for “free healthcare” growing louder in America, countries with universal systems offer a warning: long waits, rationed care, and unmet medical needs."  Maybe the advocates engage in wishful thinking.

But it is not just political hopefuls who like the idea of universal healthcare; academics seem to as well. A recent study by the Yale School of Public Health claims that single-payer universal healthcare would save more than 100,000 lives a year, and would supposedly cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace. The study, which has not been peer-reviewed yet, appears to come to its conclusions by modeling a scenario that assumes cheaper pharmaceutical prices, less administrative overhead, reduced fraud, and fewer emergency visits.

But we do not need modeling of unrealistic scenarios to see what universal healthcare could do for Americans; we just need to look at countries that have already implemented this system.

I've bookmarked that study to do my own peer review, my fear is that the authors are using streamlined, Wal-Mart management practices along with Wal-Mart style negotiating with the drug companies for continued improvement, meaning lower prices for a big jar of pickles, that is, until Vlasic calls it quits.  We'll see.

Reason's Reem Ibrahim attempts to generalize from his own collection of anecdotam ad misericordiam.

Failures like these are not surprising in universal healthcare systems. "Every time someone advocates a government activity…they say this is going to save lives. Almost never do they provide evidence establishing that," Michael Cannon, the Cato Institute's director of health policy studies, tells Reason. "No one ever tallies all of the costs of extracting that money out of the economy…[or] the foregone benefits of whatever the people who earn that money would have spent it on."

The U.S. healthcare system has plenty of problems. While the promise of "free stuff" may sound tempting, the experience of countries with universal healthcare should make Americans deeply skeptical of the idea that putting the government in charge of the entire system is a panacea.

That's logical, but, as is often the case, only after every "progressive" idea the political class tries comes a cropper will policy makers be willing to consider commercial freedom and trade-tested betterments.