You mean minimum wage hikes come out of *our* pockets?

[Schneed10]

Uh oh, you brought up healthcare, I'm in healthcare. We're officially off track, your fault!

No seriously, not to derail, but just want to say something that everyone might find interesting from a moral dilemma standpoint. Where I work we have an amazing HIV clinic, we're in a very poor section of Philadelphia where you would naturally find more HIV patients. Our physician who runs it is outstanding.

We also are part owners in a Medical Assistance HMO in this same neck of the woods, and plenty of the patients see our HIV physician routinely. Well the members of our Medical Assistance HMO are racking up incredible costs on HIV medications, even people who are in the Medicare product are doing so. It's killing us financially, the drugs are so expensive.

So we asked the physician why are we doing so poorly on the Medicare patients. She said HIV treatments have advanced to the point where now these people are living. In the 80s they'd all be dead, but now they live into their 60s, 70s, 80s because of the advances in treatment.

So the treatment is working, causing them to live longer, and require more treatment for more years because they remain alive.

That is exactly what healthcare is supposed to accomplish. But it also illustrates why healthcare has gotten so expensive. We as an industry can do more to limit cost growth, but it's going to keep getting more expensive because of things like this.

Want to extend cancer survival rates from 3 year to 5 years? Those extra two years of life come with an awful lot of drug treatments.

All this is to say, we all need to understand that the cost is going up and up and up. It will affect all of us. To expect that we don't have to bear some of the cost burden as individuals is unrealistic.