Insured or Not, Women and Children’s Health Shortchanged

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/05

The passage of health care reform legislation hasn’t yet curbed the steady upward creep of health insurance costs for workers. According to a study by the health research group Kaiser Family Foundation:

Total premiums for family coverage, taking into account both employee and employer contributions, are $13,770, up 3 percent from last year, the survey found.


The share of the premium paid by workers jumped 3 percentage points to 30 percent. In the dozen years the survey has been conducted, the employee share of family coverage has never topped 28 percent and has never risen more than 2 percentage points in a single year.

The soaring cost of employer-based insurance is old news by now, but in light of the recession, the pattern doesn’t augur well for the pending half-baked reform plan.

The rising cost of care could drive more employers to scale back coverage or push workers to drop coverage. The major health care reforms, meanwhile, won’t go into effect until 2014, and even then may fail to close coverage gaps, since the new private insurance exchanges will focus on the uninsured (not the dysfunctionally insured).

Health and Human Services notes that women are often marginalized in the chaotic employer-sponsored insurance system:

Women are less likely to be employed full-time than men (52% versus 73%), making them less likely to be eligible for employer-based health benefits themselves. In fact, less than half of women have the option of obtaining employer-based coverage on their own….. Single women are twice as likely to be uninsured than married women (24% versus 12%).

More at the link ---

[Mimosa]

1. Good article and true.

Self-employed partner and I pay about $13,000 for our health insurance. Plus we pay deductibles and for prescriptions. HCR bill did not help us. I think we will soon have to drop insurance because we can't afford it. But we're not poor enough for Medicaid. Scary.

[area51]

2. Kick.

Each day, 273 people die due to lack of health care in the U.S.; that's 100,000 deaths per year.

We need single-payer health care, not a welfare bailout for the serial-killer insurance agencies.

We don't need the GingrichCare of mandated, unregulated, for-profit insurance that is still too expensive, only pays parts of medical bills, denies claims, and bankrupts people. Republinazi '93 plan:

"Subtitle F: Universal Coverage - Requires each citizen or lawful permanent resident to be covered under a qualified health plan or equivalent health care program by January 1, 2005."

"We will never have real reform until people's health stops being treated as a financial opportunity for corporations."