I really don’t understand the animosity conservatives have against the uninsured now being eligible for subsidized insurance through the Affordable Care Act. Their hatred seems to be based on a few misconceptions.
- The uninsured are lazy and don’t work
- If they are working, they should have gotten a job with benefits
- I don’t want to pay for someone else’s health care
The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies published several monographs on the uninsured between 2001 and 2004. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) publishes the Employer Health Benefit Survey every year or two. Their findings are sobering.
Eighty-two percent of the uninsured either work or live in a household with someone who works. Part-time workers generally aren’t eligible for benefits. Neither are independent contractors like me. People in minimum-wage jobs often don’t get insurance, either because their employers don’t offer it or the workers can’t afford the premiums. Wal-Mart appears to have the largest number of employees on Medicaid and food stamps.
63% of workers don’t have insurance because their employers don’t offer it; another 16% are ineligible as new hires. Remember Andy Harris, the anti-Obamacare Republican Congressman from Maryland who, in 2010, complained that he’d have to wait 28 days for his taxpayer-funded health insurance?
Only 57% of all employers offer benefits. Larger companies are more likely to provide insurance. Only 45% of companies with 3-9 workers offer benefits compared to 93% of companies with 50 employees or more.
Prior to the ACA, some people couldn’t get insurance at any price. Insurers don’t want to underwrite people with expensive pre-existing conditions, like depression, diabetes, heart disease, AIDS and old age. The last one is why we have Medicare.
Having insurance doesn’t guarantee you will keep it. Your insurance will disappear if you lose your job or the spouse providing your insurance dies or divorces you. You can continue the insurance under COBRA, but you’ll pay the full premium cost plus a 2% administrative fee. We paid about $950/month when my wife lost her job. So, you can become uninsured in a heartbeat, despite working.
Having health insurance won’t necessarily protect you from financial ruin. More than 60% of bankruptcies in 2007 were due to medical debt and more than three-quarters of those people had health insurance.
Being able to afford health insurance is relative. The average costs of single and family policies in 2013 were $5,884 and $16,351. That comes to $490/month for an individual and $1363—more than my mortgage payment—for a family. And those are just averages.
Someone else IS paying for YOUR insurance. Employers heavily subsidize health insurance premiums (which they write off as a business expense). Employees pay an average of 18% of an individual plan premium and 29% of family plan premiums, often with pre-tax dollars, and they aren’t taxed on those benefits. That means they get around a 75% subsidy. The uninsured have had to pay sticker price for policies on the individual market, if they could even get insurance, with after-tax dollars.
So if you’ve had great health insurance, stop being so smug. Be grateful for what you have, because it could have disappeared in a heartbeat.