The Supreme Court Will Uphold Health Care Reform, and Here's Why

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http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/11/11136/supreme-court-will-uphold-health-care-reform-and-heres-why

Submitted by Wendell Potter on November 17, 2011 - 1:45pm

<snip>One Sick Employee Leads Insurers to Jack Up Rates for All

One of the reasons for that decline is the common practice of "purging" (again, their word, not mine). Insurers routinely purge small businesses from their rolls when an employee gets sick and has high medical expenses. All it takes is one worker at a small company to get seriously sick or injured for an insurance company to jack up rates so high the employer has no choice but to drop coverage for all employees and their dependents.

Even if their employers continue to offer coverage, more and more workers are taking a pass because they can't afford their share of the premiums. This, plus the fact that insurers have refused to sell coverage to people with preexisting conditions, explains why the number of Americans without coverage now exceeds 50 million.

Insurers have continued to be profitable, but those profits will soon start to decline sharply because of another penny-wise but pound-foolish practice: shifting more and more of the cost of care from them to us by moving us into high-deductible policies. Absent a mandate requiring that we purchase coverage, more and more of us will come to realize that these policies are not worth the premiums we have to pay for them.

A recent study by the Commonwealth Fund found that 30 million Americans are now underinsured as a result of being enrolled in policies that require them to pay more out of their own pockets for care than they can afford. Increasing numbers of those Americans are consequently resorting to another inefficient practice: foregoing needed care. In doing so, they are running the risk of needing more expensive care down the road.