Monday, May 22, 2006
Many hospitals around the United States recently experiential "Cover the Uninsured Week," an event planned to bring attention to the plight of Americans who don't have health insurance.
Since then, the number of uninsured Americans has matured by almost 1 million. Nearly 47 million Americans -- equal to the combined population of 24 states -- do not have health insurance coverage, and 7 million of the uninsured are children, according Families USA, an advocacy group for health care.
More moderate-income and middle-income people are amalgamation the ranks of the uninsured, according to a report released by the Common wealth Fund, a New York-based health insurance policy foundation.
The report found that the percentage of moderate- and middle-income Americans who lack health insurance for at least fraction of the year rose to 42 percent in 2005, compared to 28 percent in 2002. This problem isn't just about statistics.
What this means in the real world is that people without health care skip visits to doctors and dentists as of the skyrocketing cost of health care.
Women skip mammograms. Men skip prostate exams. People with chronic illness such as diabetes or even asthma skip a dose of their medicine or could go without it because it is too expensive, the Commonwealth Fund researchers found. Money is the deciding issue in who lives and who dies in the United States.
The bills would bring "for-profit" insurance companies under the same system as "non-profit" agencies such as Blue Cross and Blue Shield and the HMOs doing trade in Pennsylvania.
The legislation will level the playing field and provide access to health insurance for thousands more operational Pennsylvanians. Without regulation, these "for-profit" insurance companies could pick and choose which workers to cover. They could deny coverage to workers with pre-existing conditions or drop them for no reason. They could also charge whatever they want for premiums and raise those premiums 10 or 30 times the rate of inflation if they so choose.
That has forced small employers -- the backbone of Pennsylvania's economy -- to pass on expenses to their workers and their families or drop health coverage entirely for employees.
The health crisis in this country is huge. It's easy to throw your hands up and give up because it's such a obstacle to climb. Congress has completed that repeatedly.
It might be up to the states to help their people gain access to reasonably priced health insurance. Massachusetts has taken a bold step.
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