Letter to the Editor: Insure Missouri: A step in the right direction

“Worrisome.” That’s how Eric Dixon of the Show-Me Institute describes details of Gov. Blunt’s Insure Missouri initiative in a column Springfield Business Journal published Oct. 22. While there are some areas of concern, Insure Missouri is a step in the right direction.

Dixon describes health care as a scarce resource that is allocated by rationing. He states that in the consumer-based market, rationing by price determines that “whoever most values a good will be the one who receives it.” This is inaccurate. Experience shows that when price is the determiner, it is those who have sufficient available resources who “get the goods.”

Low- and moderate-income individuals certainly value health care, they just don’t have the means to afford it due to the extraordinary high cost of insurance coverage.

The U.S. system of allowing market forces to control the availability of health care is not working. A comparison of outcomes and available resources indicates that America’s bang for its health care buck is considerably less than in other countries. The U.S. per capita spending on health care is about twice that of Canada and Germany – yet adult death and infant mortality rates in the United States are higher than in these two countries. While the insurance systems of other countries are far from perfect, they provide access to health care for all at much lower costs.

Another major problem in the United States is the high number of uninsured: 47 million. Missouri’s uninsured population grew at a rate about three times that of the rest of the country from 2005–06. Employer-sponsored insurance continues to decrease.

The cost of health insurance premiums and cost-sharing for employees who have private insurance continue to rise more rapidly than workers’ income and inflation. The cost of the health care for the uninsured is passed on as higher premiums for those who have insurance.

Most of the uninsured live in poor or near-poor families with incomes less than $41,000 (200 percent of the federal poverty level) for a family of four. These people lack health insurance and often forego preventive care and necessary treatment because they can’t afford them, not because they don’t value health care.

They need realistic options for affordable insurance because the market has not been responsive to their needs.

Insure Missouri is a good proposal because it offers health insurance and health care to struggling families at an affordable cost. Dixon criticizes Insure Missouri because it treats routine health care as an insurance matter, yet the very strength of Insure Missouri is that it is a health insurance program that will allow low- and moderate-income families to get the routine care they need to stay healthy and productive. … Insure Missouri is a first step, but it falls short because it does not address individuals with disabilities, the elderly, and children who lack health insurance or who are paying extremely high premiums each month to get needed care.

The proposal is worrisome because it is not clear that there will be legislative support and funding to fully implement it. Missourians are concerned about the growing cost of health care. The time is ripe to move forward and make affordable health insurance available to everyone.

—Ruth Ehresman, director of budgetary & health policy, The Missouri Budget Project[[In-content Ad]]