This issue focuses on average household spending on health insurance, from the multiple-year Consumer Expenditure (CEX) Surveys of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Such surveys are meant to indicate the needs of ~2.5 persons per household, or what the BLS refers to as a “consumer unit.” Multi-year data only goes to 2019.
When expressed as the number of weeks of median household income required to cover the health insurance expenditure of the CEX surveys, the sharpest loss in the affordability of healthcare occurred when the Affordable Care Act was implemented in 2013:
If just one blue-collar (non-supervisory) worker was paying for the health insurance of a “consumer unit” of approximately 2.5 people, then here is the number of weeks of pay required to cover that cost:
The first four necessities are Energy, Housing, Food, and Healthcare — and the affordability of those necessities has been shown to be dropping ever since the USA moved away from free market capitalism and toward a socialist, welfare economy with more and more government regulation and more and more government spending.
The fifth and “final” economic necessity is transportation (e.g., car prices), which will be covered next.
Reference
[Multi-year surveys of consumer spending] — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/cex/csxmulti.htm
[median household income] — U.S. Census Bureau, Median Household Income in the United States [MEHOINUSA646N], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
[average blue collar income] — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Average Weekly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, Total Private [CES0500000030], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000030