By Becky Moeller President, Texas AFL-CIO
A report commissioned by the health insurance industry and released this week claims that one version of the proposed health care reform bill will raise insurance premiums for families over the next 10 years by $4,000.
The America’s Health Insurance Plans document reminds me of the Transformers movies, where some pipsqueak machine (the saboteur who started spreading tall tales of “death panels”) morphs into a monstrous end-of-movie threat (the big-money opponents of reform). Even the accounting firm that worked on the cartoonish study is disavowing its own estimate, acknowledging that various proposals actually in play would dramatically reduce the cost.
Although the AHIP report clearly has a “Yeah, that’s the ticket” feel to it, one important area in which it doesn’t dare to dwell is the estimate of what will happen if health care reform fails. Those of us who get to see the full cost of annual health insurance premiums know, for example, that health insurance premiums have risen by a lot more than $4,000 over the last 10 years under the current system.
And what will happen over the next 10 years if we repeat the error of past decades and do nothing about rising health insurance costs and declining coverage? A new Urban Institute report breaks down what it will cost those fortunate families who manage to keep their coverage over the next 10 years.
In Texas, the report states, employer premiums will rise by 86 percent. Family premiums will rise by 57.9 percent. And the proportion of uninsured Texans will continue to approach one-third and amount to 7,268,000 people by 2019. That would be fully one in eight of all uninsured Americans.
Those numbers represent a bleak future and cry out for reform, but I would argue that the Urban Institute report is itself flawed. The actual picture would probably be much worse than the numbers suggest because employers in Texas are not likely to sit still as health insurance premiums rise by another 86 percent. They would reduce coverage instead, or hire fewer people, or try to pass along so much of the cost that workers themselves would start to give up on having insurance as more and more of them fall short of what it takes to buy a policy.
The core reform proposals moving through Congress offer a better future for Texas workers and employers alike. Our state, already 50th in the percentage of our residents who are covered by health insurance, cannot condemn 7.2 million people to perpetual health care limbo and hope to enjoy broad economic growth. Texans cannot afford to suffer even more denials of coverage and spiraling costs.
Under a meaningful health care reform bill that delivers coverage for all Americans, employers who do the right thing and provide workers with decent coverage would not have to worry that competitors who take the low road are reaping a huge cost advantage. While the very large majority of workers who now have coverage would simply keep it, an injection of real competition into the system in the form of a public option would control costs and ensure access to quality care.
Meaningful health care reform would make certain that Americans with pre-existing medical conditions would be able to obtain coverage. Reform would eliminate the fiascos in which some insurance companies respond to a major illness by hunting for the failure to report any medical condition, like acne in one notorious example, as an excuse to avoid paying benefits.
Americans have figured out that the status quo in our health care system is the enemy and that future growth depends heavily on fixing the system. Poll after poll shows strong support for a robust public option -- even in states whose lawmakers continue to resist change of any kind. If there was one message in the 2008 election, it was that voters expect meaningful health care reform that delivers decent coverage to all Americans.
There is plenty of room for legitimate debate as the health care bill passes through the 11th legislative hour. But on one point there should be little discussion: as we hear bigger and scarier tall tales about health care reform, the scariest thing of all would be to do nothing. Becky Moeller is president of the Texas AFL-CIO, a state labor federation consisting of more than 200,000 affiliates who advocate for working families in Texas.
