I subscribe to the Philadelphia Inquirer. It comes every day. I usually skim the business section and sometimes find something of interest there but I nearly always read the column by Jeff Gelles. Just a few days ago I found a great article on our current healthcare situation.
It starts like this:
If a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes a handful of numbers can prove just as valuable. Take these:
The average annual health-insurance premium for a family that gets coverage through work: $16,351.
The median income last year for a family of four: $79,698.
The gross annual income for a full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage: $15,080.
Those numbers tell a crucial story getting lost in the noise over the troubled rollout of the online insurance exchange at HealthCare.gov and the anger and confusion over cancellation notices – about 3.5 million so far, by one estimate – blamed on the Affordable Care Act.
It bears repeating here. The 2010 law wasn’t a needless intervention in a well-functioning insurance market. It was designed to address a failure of that market to meet a basic human need – a failure those three numbers reflect.
The article is Truth about health care: System was already broken. The article is by Jeff Gelles. His column appears regularly in our paper and I find he almost always has something worth saying and he says it well.
I put one area in the quote bold type. Read the article and see if you agree.
Jack…I agree the healthcare system was already in need of a fix prior to the ACA. Don’t see where the points highlighted by you reflect that issue though and more importantly how the ACA fixes this problem. Even a full time worker making min wage but covered by his employer would most likely have his insurance cost subsidized to some extent by the employer. Thus, his out of pocket cost would be more inline with what he could afford.
The current system needs fixes…for sure. The ACA does not address those fixes adequately at all and qute franly even adds a significant number of additional problems. ACA needs to be fixed itself and fast.
Bill
Hi Bill,
I agree with you that the ACA needs to be fixed. I like the goals of increasing health coverage, but I do have trouble with some of the particulars.
You cite the full time minimum wage worker who is covered by employer insurance. Unfortunately many of the low wage workers do not have employer provided insurance or have inadequate insurance. Some companies provide good insurance but others don’t. I do not know the numbers but I’m think there are a good number in each category.
I thought overall it was a very good article although, as you have pointed out, there are cases which don’t fit into to the numbers presented early in the article.
Jack