Next year, large employers will see the highest annual percentage increase in healthcare costs in a decade, according to preliminary survey results showing a 15% average increase in health benefit costs for 2003.

Benefits consulting firm Towers Perrin said the survey also indicates that employees will be paying much more out-of-pocket next year through higher monthly contributions, deductibles and co-payments.

The findings are based on an analysis of the first 268 responses to Towers Perrin's annual Health Care Cost Survey, conducted in August and September. The consulting firm expects to release full survey results in December.

For the fourth consecutive year, employers are being pummeled with double-digit increases in healthcare costs, driven in large part by the highest HMO renewal rates since the early 1990s, the survey found. HMO rate increases for 2003 will average 15% for active employees and more than 20% for retirees.

Higher HMO rates are partly the result of accelerating medical and pharmacy expenses, Towers Perrin said.

"If pharmacy costs continue to outpace inflation by three- or four-fold, we predict the employers will not continue to deliver this benefit as they have done in the past," said Jim Foreman, the consulting firm's managing director of health and welfare.

To help offset higher health plan costs, large employers are shifting more of the burden to their workers. Employees will absorb 22% of the cost of family coverage next year, up from 21% this year, according to Towers Perrin. The average employee contribution will jump to $160 a month, from $134 a month this year. Those who buy coverage for themselves will pay 19% of the cost in 2003, up from 17% in 2002. Individual-only contributions will rise to $48 a month, on average, from $38 a month this year.

The current disease oriented system is collapsing and the fact that the current anemic economy is limiting more family's access to their perception of "health" care is in desperate need of modification.

Even if all the uninsured received instant health care benefits, the problem would not be solved as the current paradigm needs to be transformed to one that focuses on health and not on disease.

I believe my journalist friend Nick Regush summarized the problem quite nicely earlier this year:

"There is no way to be nice about this. There is no point in raising false hopes. There is no treatment or vaccine in sight. There is no miracle breakthrough on the horizon.

Medicine, as we know it, is dying. It is entering a terminal phase.

What began as an acute illness reached the chronic stage about a decade ago and its progression towards death has been remarkably swift and well beyond anything anyone could have predicted.

The disease is caused by conflict of interest, tainted research, greed for big bucks, pretentious doctors and scientists, lying, cheating, invasion by the morally bankrupt marketing automatons of the drug industry, derelict politicians and federal and state regulators - all seasoned with huge doses of self-importance and foul odor."

I do not share this to be the purveyor of bad news, but to announce that a new day is dawning. As many of you are already aware, the drugs and surgery the existing medical establishment has foisted on you are not the solution to better health, but merely their methods of making more money off of you by treating only diseases - diseases their paradigm helped to foster in the first place. Consider that:

Retail pharmacies filled 3 billion prescriptions in the U.S. in 2000.

We are currently spending 1.4 trillion dollars for healthcare in the US, or 14% of our current overall budget. That is projected to double in the next 8 years to 3 trillion dollars, a staggering 17% of our total national output.

Folks, those are figures in trillions, not billions. Three trillion dollars is 3,000 billion dollars.
"The consequences of this shift of resources will be enormous for companies, workers and the government. It will mean a massive transfer of the nation's income, including profits, wages and tax dollars, to disease-oriented traditional medical care.

"Employees will face an increasingly stark situation: the more money they receive in on-the-job benefits, the less they'll receive in wages, pensions, or vacation time."

- From Business Week August 26, 2002 p 144.

The sad tragedy is that we are spending all of this money on disease management focused on drugs and surgery and our return on this investment is profoundly poor

And guess who is going to be paying this bill?

As the above article shows - YOU are. The country and private industry simply cannot afford to continue to pick up this tab without risking serious jeopardy to their future financial stability.

Business Week further comments:

"Perhaps one-third of all medical spending-some $600 billion dollars-may be unnecessary, out-of-date, or even dangerous treatments."

The recent articles below, each of which discusses $3 billion dollar wastes of your money, evidence this.

We are not achieving the high levels of health that we could be. Increasing amounts of people do not have the energy they need to get through the day, while millions of others are suffering with painful crippling diseases because they have violated basic health principles.

Many of you know that my goal is to facilitate the transformation of the current system that is on the verge of collapse. The approaches I have described in over 20,000 pages on Mercola.com over the last five years offer the solution to this crisis.

We can solve well over 90% of all chronic diseases with simple, inexpensive natural therapies.

Following the eating plan and radically reducing grain and sugar intake while optimizing omega 6:3 fat ratio will likely reduce over 50% of the health problems Americans currently experience.

I know this is true because I have successfully treated many thousands of patients from all over the country with these techniques.

Mercola.com is already an outstanding health resource for you. But beginning this autumn and slated for completion at the end of the year, we will launch powerful new technology offering you a simple, one-stop method of obtaining the knowledge and advice to solve nearly any health care problem without expensive drugs, vitamin supplements, or surgeries.

My approach in providing you this solution is two-phased. The first involves establishing all the information necessary to solve your problems. This has been a massive undertaking stretching over several years, but we are rapidly nearing completion, and much of this expertise is already available to you on Mercola.com. Our refinements will include making all this wisdom even easier to access - literally putting the research and knowledge of many experts right at your fingertips.

In the second phase, targeted for completion before the end of the year, Mercola.com will offer you the world's most sophisticated database of natural medicine healthcare practitioners. You, the user community, will rate them, so you can find the outstanding practitioners closest to your home.

My experience is that even with all the right answers, many people need the guidance of such professionals to help them implement a successful health recovery or maintenance program. I am constantly saddened that so many patients fly in to see me in my office because they don't know of anyone close to them who can help them with their health problems. This is really an information problem that the Internet can easily solve, and it is my aim to do just that.

Nearly $3 Trillion Dollars in U.S. Health Spending is Projected

Hypocrisy Oath -- The Great Divide Between Principal And Practice In Modern Medicine

3 Three Billion Dollar Hoaxes:

3 Billion Dollar Hoax

Another 3 Billion Dollar Hoax

Bombshell -- Major Premarin Trial Halted