Commentary on Healthcare and Aparigraha

The debate about America’s health and the state of America’s health insurance system continues to make headlines. Our own experience has been one of surprise and frustration. Our company has a small group plan whose premiums were increased this year by 25.6%. The breakdown of the percentage increase was quite revealing, 9.31% is due to a “medical trend factor” and 14.91% is due to the group getting one year older. That’s right; the insurance company is increasing our group rate by almost 15% just because we are a year older. No significant illnesses in the group over the last year, just a year older.

Now, our group can live a healthy life style watching what we eat, meditating, and practicing yoga daily, but we cannot do anything about getting older. This made us think about the public health care debate including how to control the cost of health care and to ensure coverage. We add our voices that something needs to be done. Perhaps what is being legislated is not the ultimate solution, but getting started with legislation that will help control the cost of health care and to ensure coverage, providing all Americans with options is important and must be done now.

Why now? Assuming the intention of our current health provider is to continue to raise our premiums for every year we get older and beginning with an average of $300 for an individual policy, then in ten years the premium for just getting older will increase from $300 to $1214 a month. If the rate of increase includes the “medical trend factor” (25%), then it will increase from $300 to $2794 a month. We don’t know many people whose income is increasing by 25% a year, so having health care increase at that rate is devastating. What will the increase be if someone actually gets sick?

The last yama (discipline, restraint, attitude, behavior) is aparigraha. Parigraha means “to take” or “to seize”. Aparigraha therefore means something like “not seizing the opportunity”. T.K.V. Desikachar states that aparigraha means to take only what is necessary and not to take advantage of a situation. From a personal perspective, we shouldn’t take more than what we have earned because if we do, we are exploiting someone. From a business perspective, like that of the health care industry, aparigraha could be interpreted to mean that there must be a balance between profit and benefiting a broader community, our society. One way that balance could be achieved is by not exploiting Americans who want to maintain their health, get treatment when necessary, and still live a responsible and reasonable life. We hope that the concept of aparigraha can be understood and practiced by not only individuals, but by legislatures and businesses.