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Ask youself: What Happens if I lose my job?

Jan 25, 2010 | By: Mr_Blue | Tags: health care reform, universal health care

Many people who are right now arguing for “freedom” or “less government” particularly in the case of health care reform fail to realize the ramification of lost employment. Now, if you are independently wealthy this is not a problem. But most Americans are not independently wealthy.

Right now most working people receive their health care through their employer. Our health care system relies heavily on employer sponsored health insurance coverage:

The downward trend, as seen in the above graph, has been occurring for a long time. It’s simple: there is NO law requiring employers to provide health care coverage to workers AND the cost to employers of providing health care coverage is becoming even more expensive and burdensome. So what are employers doing: 1) dropping and/or not offering health care coverage or 2) passing the higher cost of premiums unto its workers. Workers are stuck between a rock and hard place - either no coverage or higher premiums means less take home pay. And if you or a family member has a pre-existing condition you are even more screwed.

But this obviously assumes we work for someone who offers health care coverage or bigger assumption that we are employed. What happens when we are unemployed? Well, unfortunately, your options are few and far between. Sure, there is COBRA - a government creation BTW - but that is limited in the amount of time covered and most importantly the premiums are extremely high because they are not subsidized by former employer. Bottomline: you have no other option but to bust ass and find another job but go without health care coverage (a very risky proposition especially if you have children).

Too many people fail to realize that for many us we are one job away from the poor house. Our safety net provided by the government in form of COBRA and unemployment insurance is not enough to cover longer term unemployment - the kind we are seeing today. Health care reform was attempting to address this deficiency.

Health care reform’s original goals were suppose to guarantee very important ‘freedoms’: mainly access to health care and burden of extremely high cost of health care. We are the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn’t have some form of universal health care coverage. Purely from the sense of global competition this is not a good thing.

In terms of health care, there are serious consequences to “less government” and more “freedoms”. We are stuck with the broken, inefficient, and highly costly health care system we currently have. And NO guarantee that our health care coverage will exist tomorrow.

Good luck.