With the prospect of a Democratic vote Sunday to enact sweeping health care reform at last, Republican lawmakers at both the state and national levels across the country are revving up their attempts to falsely portray the epic health care struggle as a national Armageddon, the tipping point toward a societal and federal disaster.
Rep. Zach Wamp has promised to “fight” any federal mandates under health care reform and to defend the state’s sovereignty with “every ounce of (his) being.” State Senator Ron Ramsey, who, like Mr. Wamp, is also a Republican gubernatorial candidate, has called on the state House to approve legislation — already passed by the senate — to “protect Tennesseans from federal action” on health care reform. And Georgia’s state senators approved a bill Thursday aimed at changing Georgia’s constitution to allow the state’s residents the right to opt out of possible health care coverage.
Myopic demagoguery
This sort of myopic demagoguery abounds across the country in Republican controlled legislatures. It’s all being done in league with congressional Republicans in Washington to generate massive public pressure on Democrats before their vote Sunday on health care reform, and to negatively influence Americans’ view of reform if the legislation is approved.
The great irony, of course, is that health care reform would prove a blessing for the vast majority of Americans, especially the 90 percent of U.S. households with typically two wage earners and incomes below $120,000. It would eliminate insurance industry abuses and establish the base for secure, affordable health care that can’t be taken away or denied because of someone’s health condition or illness.
That’s critical for most working families. Health insurance premiums have been soaring at several multiples of average wage increases for years. In addition to rising premiums, Americans are having to pay more out-of-pocket expenses for higher deductibles, co-pays and uncovered services, while big insurance giants rack up record profits.
Tennesseans losing ground
As a result, employers keep dropping their company-subsidized policies, leaving individual and family breadwinners to fend for themselves. Tennessee, in fact, had the nation’s highest drop in employer-sponsored coverage in the 2000-2008 period: 9.6 percent of employers dropped their employee policies, according to a newly released study by the authoritative Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. That leaves Tennessee with well under 60 percent of employers who sponsor insurance.
Small wonder the report also showed that Tennessee’s percentage of uninsured residents rose 6.4 percent in the same period, the highest increase among all states and far higher than the average 1.7 percent increase in uninsured in the 2000-2008 period.
Tennessee also had 763,500 more uninsured residents from low- and middle-income families than a decade ago, and 86,000 more uninsured middle-income earners, bringing the uninsured total for the middle income bracket to 256,500. And 265,000 more low-income earners (those making less than 200 percent of the poverty level) became uninsured, raising the state’s number in that bracket to 507,000.
With a state population barely over 6 million individuals and less than 2.5 million families — many of whom are on Medicare, Medicaid or state or military insurance — those are huge numbers in the pool of uninsured.
And all of these figures were collected before the economic downturn that in 2009 significantly increased the numbers of jobless and uninsured. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation estimates that more than 1 million Tennesseans — fully one in six — are now uninsured.
With so many Tennesseans and their families lacking health insurance — or one lay-off away from being uninsured or medically bankrupt — Republican opposition to health care reform, and their cruel attempts to portray it as something bad or wrong, are simply stunning.
Americans everywhere know of cases, many from personal experience, where insurance coverage has been denied, limited, rescinded or canceled just when families most need it: when they become seriously ill, or have been laid off from their jobs.
A Russian roulette statis quo
Far too many Americans, and Tennesseans, have faced or will face medical bankruptcy and a terminal condition simultaneously. Many now, for example, develop a devastating disease and are subsequently forced to quit work, are or put on disability and are never able to return to work. Then they see their COBRA insurance benefits expire and their access to health care dry up completely, leaving them to face a difficult disease or painful death without help or insurance. We are all vulnerable to that Russian roulette.
If such a person is a breadwinner whose family policy had provided health insurance for a spouse and children, the entire family loses its insurance along with its main income, and the difficulty of getting medical care hits all family members.
None of these dire and all-too-frequent consequences need happen. Passage of reform legislation now in Congress would immediately begin to change that dynamic.
When reform becomes law
On the day that health reform becomes law, for example, annual caps on insurance reimbursements would be eliminated. Insurance companies would immediately lose the power of recission — the ability to cancel policies and quit covering people who have paid their premiums when they become ill. Exclusions for pre-existing conditions for children would be eliminated, and all other pre-existing conditions would begin to be phased out. And parents could keep their children on their policies until their 26th birthday.
As larger parts of the law are implemented, families with incomes of up to $88,000 (four times the poverty level) would qualify for income-based subsidies to buy insurance, and more than 31 million uninsured Americans would be able to buy, and afford, insurance. In addition, the savings under other reform measures would actually reduce federal deficit spending on health care by $138 billion over the next 10 years.
Why, we should ask, would Republican lawmakers want to fight against such improvements — to “protect” us from them? Indeed, rational Americans keep confirming in polls that they want and need such reforms. And when we get them, and see that Armageddon hasn’t occurred, Americans will fight to keep them.