Health Care For the Poor, Health Security For the Middle Class
Dana Goldstein points out that, as far as explicit subsidies for the purchase of health insurance goes, just about any conceivable health plan is tilted towards helping the poor more than the middle classes. In a straight dollars sense, this is true: “At 300 percent of poverty — $66,150 for a family of four — Baucus requires a family to spend 13 percent of its income on health care before government subsidies kick in. That’s a burdensome $8,600.”
But that seems to be ignoring the real problem for the middle class regarding health insurance. I’m not so sure it’s cost, or , if it is cost, that’s not what people are complaining about or are worried about. The cost of normal health insurance, notwithstanding large, unexpected expenses, is pretty well hidden from a lot of people, especially if they get coverage from their employer. The problem is, instead, for the self-employed or people who might lose their job and have to buy health insurance .It’s a security problem, not a coverage problem. All the consumer protections — guaranteed issue, community rating, no preexisting conditions, caps on out of pocket expenses — are a huge boon to everyone who isn’t super rich and purchases health insurance.
In some sense, you want most people to pay for a good portion of their normal health expenses on their own. What you don’t want is people being too poor to afford health care, people going bankrupt paying for health care, or people not being able to purchase reasonably priced insurance because of preexisting conditions. And just about any Democratic plan, from the Baucus compromise to the tri-committee bill, gets us closer to those protections being a reality.
See Nick Beaudrot as well.
