No health reform? You lose
- February 4, 2010
- 3 comments
- Posted in Health Insurance, Latest Posts
You don’t get to keep the insurance deal you have now, if health reform fails. Your cosseted legislators will stay fully covered for life (including the Senators who want to kill the bill), but every American will feel the pain.
Without reform, employer-sponsored coverage will continue to decline, the percentage of the population that’s uninsured will rise, spending on public programs such as Medicaid will balloon and, over the next decade, out-of-pocket costs for families and individuals could increase by more than 35 percent. Middle-class working families will be the hardest hit. So will the federal deficit, which cannot be controlled without the kinds of medical-cost reforms included in the original bill. Did I mention that Americans without insurance (or without adequate insurance) get sicker, endure more pain and die sooner that people with coverage? And that overwhelming medical bills are now the major reason that people are forced to declare bankruptcy?
For more, see “The Cost of Failure to Enact Health Reform: Implications for the States,” a study done by the Urban Institute http://www.urban.org/health_policy/url.cfm?ID=411965. They ran three economic scenarios. All of them show substantial increases in group-insurance premiums for businesses of all sizes. That means lower wages as the cost get passed to workers, much higher premiums and co-pays, and substantial numbers of firms, especially smaller ones, dumping their plans and leaving you to the tender mercies of the high-cost individual insurance market. In 29 states, the number of people without insurance would rise by more than 30 percent (Florida shows the largest increase). The states with generous payments for Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program would almost certainly cut them back, making the health-care crisis even worse. Even so, taxpayers would face a rising burden.
With decent reform, middle-class and working-class families would pay less for individual health insurance than they do today. The plan is expensive but not as expensive as doing nothing.
The people telling you lies about the health reform bill (death panels, government takeover) have a vested interest in the deteriorating health insurance programs we have today. They want to raise their profits by kicking sick people out of the system (insurance companies). They want to be free to raise prices at will (drug companies). They want to reject more people who lack coverage (hospitals). And they want to get elected by angry voters who’ve been misled about how insurance reform could help them (right-wing politicians).
Anyone who celebrates the possible death of health reform has no idea. That includes seniors who, happy with their own taxpayer-paid insurance, oppose extending even privately-paid insurance to people and families under 65. Even their own children and grandchildren. What are they thinking?
I’m so glad I found your blog site … perhaps one of the few sensible advice/commentaries I’ve come across on the web. Your article on why ‘Senate is broken and cannot be fixed’ was awesome !
Please keep up the good work and keep it coming !
Ms. Quinn – I greatly appreciate how you have broken down the pressing issues of health care reform into digestable terms. But I do take exception to one element of your argument, that being that hospitals tend to “reject people who lack health insurance”. Although I know not all hospitals are run in the same way, I work at a large non-profit university hopital (as a physican) and have never turned away an uninsured patient. In fact, we have case management/social work professionals and out-sourced group who help assist patients with obtaining insurance (usually Medicaid) while admitted for medical care.
In my experience, hospitals such as ours, which so often provide care to the uninsured at a loss, would stand to gain from reform that would reduce the pool of uninsured patients by reducing the number of patient’s cared for without reimbursement.
That said, private for-profit hospitals may be very different in their approach to uninsured patients, despite what I perceive as an ethical obligation against such behavior.
You’re right that non-profit hospitals (some of them, at least) operate differently from the for-profits. Thanks for writing.