Health Care Activists Lobby To Keep Issue In The Mix

Health care activists in 30 states published reports yesterday trying to get attention for health care reform. In Tennessee, the activists served notice that they’ll continue to lobby for better coverage for state residents, even if it looks expensive.

The organization “Health Care for America Now” tallied up unemployment figures and the number of uninsured to argue for universal health care.

Vanderbilt sociologist Bruce Barry joined organizers. He says the current economic decline doesn’t postpone the need for reform.

“It doesn’t sideline the fundamental flaws in our health care system, it actually highlights them – it exacerbates their worst effects. For instance, roughly half of Tennessee’s residents currently, half or less in Tennessee, depend on their employers for health care. So someone who loses a job, may also lose their health care. And that’s a system that I think only a sadist could design.”

Barry says if unemployment reaches ten percent later this year, more than six million more Americans will be without health coverage.

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Health Care for America Now quoted these statistics for the state:

• From 2000 to 2007, premiums in Tennessee went up 61.9 percent, while median yearly earnings went up 12.1 percent.

• The state’s 2007 median income was $25,639. The average health care premium for family coverage was $10,606.

• 56 percent of Tennessee employers offer health coverage to employees.

• Those companies spend an average of $7,197 per employee per year for family coverage, or 72 percent of the costs of such premiums. Employees pay the other 28 percent

• As of December 2008, some 241,183 Tennesseans were unemployed.

Rico X, state coordinator for Health Care For America Now, says his organization expects President Barack Obama will accentuate the need for health care reform in an address to the nation tonight.

“What we really want to say is that the cost of doing nothing, of the cost to maintain the status quo, is far greater than the cost …to repair and reform this system.”

Bruce Barry is professor of management and sociology at Vanderbilt University. He says a recent nationwide survey by the prestigious Kaiser Foundation found broad support for health insurance to cover “pre-existing conditions,” even if the respondent was told it was the respondent’s own health care premiums.

Support for such coverage was politically broad, Barry says: 75 percent of Democrats supported it, 78 percent of independents and 58 percent of Republicans.

He says health insurance and coverage is an expensive problem to fix.

“What I worry about, and what I think is sort of behind this report today, is … the possibility that people will find it, sort of too easy to say, you know, health care …it’s just too hard and too expensive to solve right now with everything else that’s going on.”

Among supporters at Monday’s event was Tony Garr, director of the Tennessee Health Care Campaign.