This is more than "just, yeah, well, you know, your opinion man," as the film said. It's the conclusion of a growing number of policy makers and pundits, who look at numbers and see that the cost of doing nothing to fix our broken health care system is greater than cost of reforming the system to make it work for all Americans.
A new report, released yesterday by the New America Foundation, helps make this point at both the state and national level.
Highlighting one of the report's top findings, the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog notes that in 2016 the average cost of job-based family coverage could top $24,000. This would put the cost of family health insurance at 45 percent of median household income. The rapid increase can be attributed to the fact that based on historical trends, the cost of premiums for job-based family coverage grows at much faster rate (7.9 percent annually) than median household incomes (0.79 percent annually).
Stand-Up for Health Care, a project of Families USA, posits that it's not just individuals and families that bear the brunt of this burden but that "the cost of doing nothing also hits our nation's ability to compete in a global economy." The blog highlights another of the report's findings, that "in 2007, the economy lost as much as $200 billion due to shorter lifespans and poor health of the uninsured."
Monica Sanchez at the Campaign for America's Future outlines the case for immediate action on health reform, notes that for some, such as Paul Krugman, Lawrence Summers, Gene Sperling, "the economic crisis makes health care reform all the more pressing. They believe it would help businesses and individuals." Citing the New America report, among other recent studies, she concludes, "The data is on the side of those pushing for action on health care reform now."
The LA Times finds similar sentiments in a piece today that suggests a growing number of industry leaders, political strategists and economists seem to think the political temperature may be just right for a health care overhaul as the economic crisis raises urgency for meaningful reform.
In laying out the case for immediate action in health reform the article presents yet another finding from the Cost of Doing Nothing report, noting that "the cost per uninsured person is $4,541, or about $400 more than the average annual per-person cost of health insurance." As New America's director of health policy, Len Nichols told the LA Times, "It's cheaper to cover everyone."
As The Politico notes, groups like the AARP and Health Care for America Now (HCAN) have already started to lobby for reform. Just today, HCAN released an ad, to be aired in D.C., designed to "promote President-elect Obama's commitment to fixing health care in 2009 in order to turn around the American economy." The ad features Obama's "own words" from a campaign event, in Newport News Virginia, in which he said:
The question isn't, ‘How we can afford to focus on health care? The question is, ‘How can we afford not to?' Because in order to fix our economic crisis, and rebuild our middle class, we need to fix our health care system too...It is clear that the time has come—right now—to solve this problem.
Reported by The New Health Dialoge and reprinted under Creative Commons.
