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Health care should not be forgotten issue
With layoffs looming and stocks continuing to drop, keeping a job and making ends meet is going to be more and more of a struggle for American workers in the coming months.
The financial crisis has pushed other issues, such as health care, to the back burner.
But figures released Thursday indicate health care premiums continue to constitute a crisis of their own.
According to the consumer health organization Families USA, from 2000 to 2007, the cost of family health care premium have climbed an estimated 3.2 times faster than earnings for Nebraska workers.
Released by the Nebraska Appleseed public advocacy group, the report shows that family health coverage provided through the workplace climbed to $11,434 from $4,674, a 69.1 percent increase.
At the same time, however, the median earnings of Nebraska's workers climbed from $21,255 to $25,802, an increase of $4,547, or only 21.4 percent.
But there's more bad news. Those additional dollars from a relatively declining family budget buy less healthcare. In an effort to hold down premium costs, health insurance policies include higher deductibles, copayments and co-insurance.
It's not that the employers aren't doing their part. For family health coverage in Nebraska, the employers' portion of annual premiums in the 2000-2007 period rose from $4,847 to $8,210, or a 69.4 percent increase. At the same time, workers kicked in 57.3 percent more, their premiums climbing from $2,034 to $3,190.
Individual health coverage showed similar increases, although workers picked up 60 percent of the increase while employers paid 57.3 percent more.
How are families adjusting to the squeeze? According to the report, many of them are not. The report cites a study that found that more than half of bankruptcies are now due, at least in part, to problems with medical costs.
Both presidential candidates propose some sort of health care plan, but both have shortcomings. We have doubts about how much coverage McCain's tax credit could actually purchase, and Obama's plan would be expensive, coming from new taxes and elimination of Bush's tax cuts.
Lost in all the campaign rhetoric is just how limited a president's power actually is. Just ask Bill Clinton's wife how easy nationalized health care is to enact.
But there must be some way to fairly distribute the cost of health care across the entire population in order to provide appropriate services where they are truly needed in a timely fashion. The current system unfairly burdens taxpayers, those who pay private insurance premiums and health care providers with nationalized health care by default.
A baby step might be establishing a system of catastrophic health coverage, perhaps in combination with health savings plans, to avoid some of those bankruptcies cited above.
The trick in any national health care plan is preserving a semblance of personal freedom along the way.