EDITORIALS
Choosing government
Health care choices pressure private insurers to improve
Updated: 09/02/08 6:44 AM
People who oppose the idea of the government providing health insurance for more, most or all Americans will argue that the marketplace, not the government, should rule in such decisions.
Those people should be careful what they ask for.
New figures from the Census Bureau indicate that the marketplace for health insurance is showing a small but significant move in the direction of families choosing to be insured by government programs.
This trend toward government-paid health insurance, which is the reason why the number of uninsured Americans is actually down for the first time in eight years, is not necessarily because government health insurance is so much better than anything that can be purchased on the open market. It is because so much of what is available from the open market is priced out of so many families’ reach.
The overall poverty rate among American households is holding steady. But prices overall are up, the gap between rich and poor is growing and the median household income, adjusted for inflation, is unchanged from the year 2000.
As the cost of health care and health insurance continues to soar, fewer jobs come with affordable health insurance, or any at all. The self-employed increasingly find that they cannot afford to buy policies on their own.
Thus most of the increase in health coverage has been through the aging population moving into Medicare, more low-income families with no option other than the long-standing Medicaid programs and more children from even moderate-income families being covered by federally and state funded health insurance programs for children.
The Census report for 2007 shows that 45.7 million Americans — 15.3 percent of the population — had no health insurance. That figures to a decline of more than a million uninsured people compared to 2006. But the percentage of the population that had private health insurance, purchased individually or through employers, also dropped slightly, to 67.5 percent from 67.9 percent.
The difference was made up in government programs, which covered 27.8 percent of the population in 2007, up from 27 percent the year before.
All figures were interruptions in six-year trends, and may well prove to be a statistical glitch that will be reversed by the time 2008 figures are calculated.
With overall economic trends down in 2008, the next round of numbers will likely show that cutbacks by individuals, employers and states will result in higher percentages of uninsured once again.
One small sign that private insurance carriers may see that their expensive product doesn’t measure up is the recent announcement from Independent Health Association that it will make its product more valuable by covering more routine, preventive procedures with a no-co-pay service.
Private-sector health insurance companies really have no one but themselves to blame for the migration of customers from their plans to government-funded coverage. If the industry doesn’t make some big changes, and soon, then the marketplace may well decide, once and for all, that only government action can place health insurance within reach.
