Can We Afford Not to Fix our Health Care System?

Affordability is one of the primary principles for which AARP is advocating in the national health care reform debate. It’s an issue which Arkansas’s elected officials have addressed recently.

During the Fourth of July recess, Senator Blanche Lincoln told Arkansans—including some AARP volunteers—at a meeting in Hot Springs, that one half million people in Arkansas lack health insurance and she noted this produced a hidden tax of $1,500 per person. Senator Lincoln made the point that rising health care costs are felt by everyone—not just the uninsured. The senior senator from Arkansas said health care reform is an economic issue and the cost of doing nothing is tremendous and unacceptable.

According to AARP, the financial burden of health care will only get worse over time without action. If nothing is done, the average family premium for employer sponsored insurance will jump by nearly 40 percent in four years, and will almost double by 2016. The full cost will rise from an average of about $13,000 last year to over $24,000 in 2016.

As health care costs continue to grow faster than wages, insurance will become more and more unaffordable. The share of income spent on family’s health insurance will nearly double between now and 2016—jumping from 6.7 percent of median household income this year to 9 percent in 4 years, and to 12 percent in 8 years.

Employers—if they can afford to keep picking up most of the cost of employee coverage—will see their share of health insurance bills increase from an average of almost $9,900 per worker today to $13,300 in 2012 and $17,900 in 2016.

Without health reform, the average health insurance deductible—what people have to pay before their insurance kicks in—will climb 73 percent in the next eight years to over $2,000.

The deepening economic crisis will force millions to turn to government help for health care without reform. Many economists predict that the unemployment rate will reach 9 percent by the end of the year. Unless something is done, each one percentage point rise in the unemployment rate could cause 1.1 million to become uninsured and Medicaid and SCHIP enrollment to jump by 1 million at a cost to taxpayers of $3.4 billion.

Some in Washington are saying that we cannot afford health reform, and we need to wait. This just doesn’t make sense. AARP’s position is that now is the time to fix the system so we have quality, affordable health care for all Americans.