Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

The Real Problem of Covering the ‘Uninsured’, Pt.7 – In the shuffle, millions are left out.

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5) With a major shift from employer-based health insurance to individual health insurance, should Mr. McCain’s next desired outcome be realized, where ‘charitable’ employers who drop employer-based health insurance, actually pass their savings on to their workers in the form of higher wages. If that happens, further disparities (or ‘dispairities’) are anticipated. Actual ‘take-home’ pay will not be straight-forward. Income tax brackets and ‘effective’ payroll taxes will both change.

6) With the ‘deregulation’ if consumer-protective health insurance mandates as well as load-shifting between group risk pools and individually risk-assessed plans, health insurance providers are sure to re-package and re-price their products. The effect this will have from both the employers’ and employees’ perspective is largely indeterminable at this point. Not only the premium cost is in question, but the larger effect may be in the scaled-back approach in benefits that is the current trend of the individual private health industry today. The 27 million segment of Americans having inadequate health could swell dramatically. These are the people who are now forced into bankruptcy at an unprecedented rate.

7) Perhaps the most serious of McCain’s vagaries are the tenuous positions of Medicaid, Medicare, SCHIP, poverty-stricken households and chronic cases. 66% of the ‘uninsured’ have incomes below 200% of the poverty line - about $35,200 for a family of three - and have no wiggle room for health insurance. 8) 33% of the working-age ‘uninsured’ (between18 and 64 years of age) are chronic cases (typically denied or out-priced from private health insurance). This 34.2 million figure is a subset of the total 47 million ‘uninsured’, based on the 2006 US Census.

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