By Jim Rockett

At first, I felt perfectly sane sitting there in the doctor’s office with my wife.  We were in the middle of several doctor appointments trying to figure out what is causing her double vision (don’t worry, I’m driving) and a few other annoying symptoms.   Such appointments tend to ground you in reality.

Then came the long wait while my wife endured various scans and other medical diagnostics.  That left me in the lobby with America’s fair and balanced cable channel featuring, shall we say, lively discussions about our current health care brouhaha.  Goodbye reality, hello Twilight Zone.  I witnessed an amazing mix of ideology and emotion.  I was treated to some disappointing words, like socialism and fascism.  And I couldn’t help but marvel at the motor-mouth delivery and chic haircuts of these hard core news people. (Ok, I’ll stop.  But really, add a little coherence and any one of them could host a TV reality show.)

Sarcasm aside, the message from these talking heads was clear: I and my family will be better off if there is stalemate on health care reform.  And they did (repeatedly and gleefully) cite one source, that being a PriceWaterhouseCoopers report which allegedly shows that the Baucus bill would increase health care costs for a typical family by $27,700 beyond what that family would pay under our current system.  Ouch, that would be bad.

But a little googling and reading revealed that the report says no such thing.   If you actually read the report, including all the footnotes, you realize the report can be summarized in this fashion:  take your calculator and for everything that costs money, enter the number and hit the plus sign; for measures that save money, do nothing.  I’m not kidding.  Those PWC consultants know how to cover themselves.  They explain, in plain English, that they were instructed to ignore measures that save money.  Who instructed them?  Why, the client who hired the to write the report, of course, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) – the lobbying arm of the health insurance industry.

Ok, I was duly insulted.  In an effort to deal with something that was real and definitely outside the Twilight Zone, I turned to my paycheck stubs.  My pay stubs have numbers on them, and beside one of the numbers is this label called “Medical”.  It tells me how much money is deducted from my pay for medical insurance.  And, hey!  My company allows me to view the last four years of pay stub history online, so it was easy to calculate that my medical insurance has increase 125 percent over the past four years.  Whoa!  Slow down please!

Is it just me?  Is it just my company?  No and no.  The Kaiser Foundation just released its annual 2009 Employer Benefits Survey.  Kaiser actually polls thousands of employers about health benefits offered to employees, so I am inclined to believe them when they tell me my personal cost increases are part of a nationwide trend; that employers pick up about 73 percent of the total costs, so that the true cost of health care is hidden from me unless I pay attention; that employers pass their costs on to employees in lieu of increasing wages and that these trends are expected to continue.

Expected to continue?  It’s time to address this problem.  It’s time to contact the powers that be and tell them we expect reform.  And we don’t want the cost saving measures ignored.  Keep those measures, show them to us, we like those a lot.