August 29, 2012 01:07 AM UTC

Unemployed, under-employed & uninsured: addressing the health care crisis

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• by: Denver Unemployment Examiner

Americans across the country repeatedly say they tired of the political divides – particularly with respect to the issues related to health care and jobs.   They want solutions and they want everyone to work together to find common ground and offer real-world, sensible & practical solutions.

And for the tens of millions of unemployed, under-employed – and uninsured Americans – the need for solutions couldn’t be more important and couldn’t possibly come soon enough.

According to the ‘Colorado Health Access Survey’ [CHAS*], more than 1.5 million or one in six Coloradans are uninsured or under-insured and 85% of respondents to the survey say they can’t afford the insurance premiums.

In her article titled, ‘Uninsured rate jumps as Colorado employers cut health benefits’, Katie Kerwin McCrimmon writes,

“A sharp drop in employers who offer health insurance and Colorado’s ailing economy have led to a dramatic surge in the number of Coloradans who are either uninsured or underinsured.

[…] The number of Coloradans getting their insurance through employers dropped to 57.8 percent this year from 63.7 percent two years ago. During that same period, the number of Coloradans without health insurance has jumped from 678,000 to 829,000.

“That’s a huge number of people. Just think of 150,000 people. That’s the population of Grand Junction,” said Dr. Ned Calonge, president and CEO of The Colorado Trust*. “The impact on individuals is almost unimaginable.”

The number of employers no longer offering health insurance to their employees is also on the rise. And the driving factor blamed for the increasing number of uninsured and under-insured in Colorado:  job losses and rising costs for health insurance.  The number of ‘chronically uninsured’ – those who have been without insurance for a least a year jumped to 60 percent and 52% of respondents were out of work.

“We’re reaching a tipping point where there will be more people who are uninsured than are insured,” Calonge said. “The results tell us that things were not good in 2008 and 2009 and they’re getting worse. We have to do something and we better start to do it now.”

Meanwhile, the political follies are underway – and the ‘debate’ over programs like Medicaid and Medicare are front and center in this year’s presidential elections.  Yesterday Wendell Potter, an author, media analyst and corporate watchdog wrote a piece about  the misrepresentations being made as part of the election-year posturing on both sides of the aisle. In his piece, ‘Doctors for America Sending Truth Squad to Tampa to Set the Record Straight on Health Care Reform and  ‘Doctors for America’ he writes about a coaltion of 15,000 doctors and medical professionals who are descending upon the nation’s Republican and Democratic National Conventions this week and next:

“In anticipation of these sorts of misrepresentations, doctors from all over the country — all members of a four-year-old organization called Doctors for America — have traveled to Florida to serve as a truth squad. And while they’re dispensing facts, they’ll also be providing more than a little free care. When the GOPers leave the Sunshine State, the doctors will hop on a bus and head to Charlotte to try to persuade the politicians and delegates who will gather there that they need to start aggressively defending the reform law.

Doctors for America is a bipartisan grassroots organization of 15,000 physicians and medical students from all 50 states. The organization’s executive director, Dr. Alice Chen, said the doctors decided on the road trip because “politics, not patients, has been driving the health care debate and is threatening to roll back the promise of a better health care system.”

If there are concerns about Mr. Potter’s credibility consider this:  he has held a variety of positions at Humana Inc. and CIGNA Corporation. When he left CIGNA in May 2008 he was serving as head of corporate communications and as the company’s chief corporate spokesperson.

In a recent Associated Press article titled, ‘Some below poverty line don’t qualify for Medicaid’, Carla K. Johnson and Kelli Kennedy wrote,

“The political rhetoric during a presidential campaign focuses on the middle class and leaves the uninsured working poor largely invisible, said Rand Corp. researcher Dr. Art Kellermann.

“We hear a lot of talk about unemployment and the aspirations of middle-class Americans. But we don’t hear about the consequences of unemployment and the consequences of the collapsing middle class,” Kellermann said. Losing health insurance is one of those consequences.”

“It’s like the public just doesn’t want to believe anything else until it hits home,” he said, “Until it’s their own child, brother or parent that got laid off when they were 58, until then, it’s not real.”

The Denver Unemployment Examiner has written several times about a growing group of Americans that are particularly at risk:  ‘adults without dependent children’.  Many of the nation’s long term unemployed (and under-employed).  The Associated Press writers go on to say,

“Medicaid now covers an estimated 70 million Americans and would cover an estimated 7 million more in 2014 under the Obama health law’s expansion. In contrast, Ryan’s plan could mean 14 million to 27 million Americans would ultimately lose coverage, even beyond the effect of a repeal of the health law, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation of Ryan’s 2011 budget plan.

For now, most states don’t cover childless adults, but all states cover some low-income parents. The income cutoff, however, varies widely from state to state.”

Please read the entire article here: http://www.examiner.com/articl…