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CCH® BENEFITS — 03/18/10

Health Reform Failure Would Negatively Affect Millions; Young People Most Affected

from Spencer’s Benefits Reports: As the health reform legislation has stalled in Congress, “the original motivation and rationale for the reforms appears to have become obscured, as have an understanding of what the proposals would do and who would benefit from them,” according to a new paper from the Urban Institute. In The Biggest Losers, Health Edition: Who Would Be Hurt the Most by a Failure to Enact Comprehensive Reforms?, Linda J. Blumberg, a senior fellow in the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center, examined the groups with the most to lose should comprehensive health reform fail to pass. Those groups, primarily based on 2008 statistics, include the following segments:

• 13.1 million self-employed people;

• 47.8 million individuals employed in firms of fewer than 100 workers;

• 26.9 million non-elderly people working part-time and 20.8 million people working full-time for only part of the year;

• 96.2 million non-elderly people in families with incomes below 200% of the federal poverty level (FPL); another 74.3 million living in families with incomes between 200 and 400% of the FPL;

• Millions of people with significant health problems, including the highest spending 5% of the U.S. population, who account for about half of total health spending; and

• 14.8 million people who were unemployed, as of January 2010.

“To walk away from the proposals developed, including the individual mandate, insurance exchanges, regulatory reforms of insurance markets, expanded public insurance eligibility, and premium and cost-sharing subsidies for the modest income, does even greater harm than leaving these populations in the difficult circumstances in which they find themselves today,” Ms. Blumberg said.

Without legislative change, health care costs will continue to escalate faster than paychecks, leading to growth in the number of uninsured and under-insured; medical care would become an even greater financial burden; and the numbers of people seeking charity care and public coverage would overwhelm governments and the health care system, she explained.

Currently, more than 90 million individuals do not have access to employer-sponsored health insurance, and 43% of these people are uninsured.

For more information, visit http://www.urbaninstitute.org.

Young Adults Most Affected

As if to underscore the Urban Institute’s conclusions, a report released on February 25 by the National Center for Health Statistics revealed that 30% of young adults ages 20 to 29 had no health care coverage in 2008 and were almost twice as likely as adults age 30 to 64 to be uninsured. Young adults represent nearly 13 million people, 14% of the total U.S. population, but more than one-quarter of the estimated 45 million uninsured.

The NCHS further found that in the past 12 months, 10% of young adults ages 20 to 29 years needed medical care, and 12% needed prescription drugs, but these young adults did not receive care or prescription drugs due to cost. Also in the past 12 months, 10% of young adults had two or more emergency room visits.

Young adults without insurance were less likely to have a usual source of medical care (44%) than were those with private insurance (80%) or Medicaid (84%). They also were four times as likely (21%) as those with private insurance (5%) and two times as likely as those with Medicaid (9%) to have unmet medical need.

For more information, visit http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db29.htm.

For more information on this and related topics, consult the CCH Pension Plan Guide, CCH Employee Benefits Management, and Spencer's Benefits Reports.

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