Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Stormy, Stormy, Stormy, Health Care, Pt.1 – Health Care weather report not good.

Who needs a weather forecast to inform us that we’re in the middle of the storm group? Especially when the boat is health insurance/care and the storms are the all-pervading forces of a devastating economy. About all we can do is ‘batten the hatches’, hoping to ride out the storms and just survive. Do these conditions seem remote? They shouldn’t. Do we need more evidence than the obvious? Well, we’ve finally got it. Thanks to the faithful work of the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health insurance/care research group, and good reporters like Mike Hall. Mike has just posted a more accurate forecast on the http://blog.aflcio.org website but, alas, the battered health insurance/care vessel has already become engulfed. Mike’s opening remark says it all: We’re caught in “a ‘perfect storm’ of economic troubles, more working families than ever are sacrificing needed health care.”

Again, the laborious and drawn-out effort performed by the Commonwealth Fund represents four years of data, taken from surveys along the way. The findings clearly forebode us that ”It has never been more urgent to fix the nation’s broken health care system.” The name of the report, just issued by the ‘Commonwealth’, is” Losing Ground: How the Loss of Adequate Health Insurance is Burdening Working Families. The report brings out the hard evidence of just how bad things are (as of 2007). The severely depressed segment in mention is comprised of four major subgroups, covering a full two-thirds of our nation’s working-age Americans. These would be:

1) Those without health insurance;

2) Those without adequate health insurance;

3) Those who had serious trouble covering medical bills and

4) Those who couldn’t get needed medical care due to high cost.

Continued…