Insured Americans: Be Afraid
Don McCanne points me to To Great A Burden (PDF), a report by Families USA which analyzes data on health care expenditures, and finds some pretty scary numbers and trends (my emphasis below):
- More than four out of five people in families spending more than 10 percent of their pre-tax income on health care costs are insured.
- 50.7 million non-elderly Americans with insurance are in families that will spend more than 10 percent of their pre-tax income on health care costs in 2008.
-
More than three out of four people (75.8 percent) in families spending more than 25 percent of their pre-tax income on health care
costs are insured. -
13.5 million Americans
with insurance
are in families that will spend more than 25 percent of their pre-tax income on health care
costs in 2008.
My point? These are the insured we’re talking about. The people who we quickly call “the covered.” And it’s gotten significantly worse in only 8 years:
Wake up, middle class. You don’t want to risk health care reform when you’re satisfied with your care, but how long until you’re part of the insured millions of families spending 25% of their income on health care?
And wake up, political candidates (and bloggers) that support individual mandates or continuation of the hodgepodge mess of private plans we have here–with their lifetime caps and pre-existing conditions, even the insured here are getting the rationing everyone’s so scared of under some sort of national system.