It’s ironic that there’s so much resistance to health care reform from people who don’t even realize they’re already socialists.
Americans say they don’t want socialized medicine. Guess what: You’re already getting it. It just comes from your employer, who relieves you of having to shop for it, think about it, maintain it and of course, pay for much of it.
You’re hardly like Max Alshaer, who’s operated his handyman business out of Rocklin for 15 years. Eighteen months ago he dropped his Kaiser coverage – $900 a month was too much. There was nothing cheaper.
“It was a choice between my mortgage or health care,” he says.
He only covers his children now, a $240-a-month policy that’s seen four increases in six months though the kids have yet to use it.
At age 47, Max has never been seriously ill, but if he’s seriously hurt on the job, he’s sunk – can’t work, can’t earn.
“I want to pay for my health care,” he explains. “I just want premiums to be reasonable.”
Paula Zimmerman left her payroll job at UC Davis six years ago so she and her husband, Tim, could pursue a dream: They bought a fishing lodge in Klamath. Health insurance was $205 a month. When it hit $588 last year, she called their insurer, Anthem Blue Cross.
“I asked why they kept raising the premiums,” she recalls, “and they told me, ‘Oh, we raise them every year.’ ”
The Zimmermans dropped their coverage last month. They couldn’t afford this year’s 39 percent rate hike. There was nothing cheaper. Like Max, they’re on an increasingly popular health care plan: Don’t get sick.
But if they get sick, it’s off to the ER. Once the bill tops what they can afford, the hospital will put them on MediCal and any other program it can find, passing the cost on to taxpayers, or on to insurance companies who then pass it on to their clients through higher premiums.
Paula says, “I just hope I can make it to Medicare.” She’s 51.
When you look at the profitability of Blue Cross and the plight of Americans crushed by the annual ritual of rising rates, you understand why some say a single-payer system is the answer.
Why pay Anthem a profit to handle paying for our medical procedures when the government could pay it without the profit and save us the difference?
Anthem’s reason for the rate hike: “Unfortunately, in the weak economy, many people who do not have health conditions are forgoing buying insurance. This leaves fewer people often with significantly greater medical needs in the insured pool.”
I see. You’re facing greater risk of higher payouts on claims because you priced people out of the market last year, so your solution is to raise rates this year and price more people out of the market so that next year, you can use the same excuse. Who needs these people?
Coverage for an average family costs $13,375, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 131 percent more than in 1999. If the trend continues, by 2019 the average family plan will cost $30,083.
You’re no safer at work. Today, six in 10 Americans – 160 million – get insurance through their employers, who pick up about 73 percent of the tab. But employers are dropping health benefits at alarming rates.
From 1999 to 2008, the Small Business Administration recorded a 17 percentage-point drop in the number of businesses offering health benefits – from 58 percent to 41 percent.
Mostly, small businesses are dropping coverage. In California, 98 percent of all businesses employ fewer than 100 people; more than half their employees are uninsured, according to a UCLA study. At the remaining 2 percent of firms, 29 percent of workers are uninsured.
Six percent of California firms say they’re “very likely” to drop health care coverage this year, compared with 1 percent the previous year.
With exponentially increasing heath care costs and an increasing underemployed class, how soon before six in 10 Americans becomes five, and then four in 10?
“What we’ve seen over the years is the gradual fraying of the employment-based system,” said Drew Altman, the chief executive of the Kaiser foundation. “The real Achilles heel is the small employer.”
It’s easy to oppose reform when someone else is paying for most of your coverage. You’re paying your congressman’s health care; who’s paying yours? If reform fails in Washington, we’ll have to wait until enough Americans are forced to confront the true cost of their own health care. They will, too, as employers continue to drop increasingly unaffordable employee benefits.
The free market at work!
No more socialism after that. You’ll be a true capitalist contending with rapacious corporate curmudgeons like Anthem Blue Cross while trying to come up with $13,000 to buy coverage. Or $30,000. Or you’ll end up like Max or Paula, whose health care will be paid for by those who can still afford insurance.
That’s when we’ll insist that government fix this problem. Goodness, we might even demand a single-payer system.