For almost 50 years, health care expert have diagnosed a “crisis” of high and rising health care costs. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that all of today’s crises are new. In fact, high and rising health care costs are not a new problem.

Eric Fruits writes in Oregon Business that one part of the crisis has been the rising cost of health care and health insurance. For years, the cost of health care has outpaced inflation. In turn, the costs of health insurance have risen rapidly, taking a toll on businesses and their employees. Another part of the crisis is the number of uninsured. Last year, Oregon’s governor tried to sell voters a huge tobacco tax increase by pointing to an estimated 117,000 uninsured children in Oregon. These parts of the crisis are related and were born out of the growth of the third-party payer system of covering health and medical costs.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Economy, Health Care, Press. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.