Yonit Shames
Published: August 23, 2005
As any American- young or old, employed or unemployed- knows, medical costs are rising.
Between 2002 and 2003, for example, national medical spending rose 7.7 percent- four times the inflation rate. Now, the average annual cost of medical insurance for a family of four carries a whopping price tag of nearly $13,000.
It’s no wonder that Americans are crying out for legislation that would extend health insurance coverage and reduce medical costs- particularly Americans who work in small businesses, who are less likely to be able to provide comprehensive care.
Congress’s latest answer to 45 million uninsured Americans was HR 525, or the ill-reputed Small Business Health Fairness Act of 2005, which passed on July 26 and is now making its rounds in the Senate as S 406.
The bill proposes that “association health plans,” or private healthcare plans for small businesses, be exempt from state regulation. The act is supposed to cut medical insurance costs and extend coverage to those who don’t have any by allowing competition to blossom.
Yet despite its glittering packaging, the bill has been vehemently opposed by more than 1,300 national organizations, including the American Cancer Society and the Alliance for Children and Families, to name a few. The opposition has even overridden the often vicious rift between different political factions- both the Republican and Democratic Governors Associations have opposed the bill.
Why? The key is that the bill exempts AHPs from state regulation. As the American Cancer Society points out, AHPs would not have any state-mandated requirements to provide critical and life-saving cancer screenings, such as mammograms, colonoscopies and pap smears. Studies have unequivocally proven that regular cancer screenings greatly decrease death rates for screened illnesses.
Furthermore, AHPs would not face any legislation concerning who they had to cover, naturally leading them to deny less healthy applicants. These applicants would then experience an increase in insurance rates with existing companies because there would be fewer healthy beneficiaries in those systems to subsidize their medical costs.
Additionally, because AHPs would be exempted from consumer protection laws, beneficiaries wouldn’t even have the right to appeal if their claims were denied, nor would they have any protection from insurance fraud or provider bankruptcy- both of which are state-regulated.
In fact, when AHP-like companies were introduced by Congress in the early 1970s, many of them folded, leaving nearly 400,000 people uninsured and an estimated $123 billion in unpaid medical bills.
If that’s not enough, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that AHPs would actually cause the large majority of America’s small businesses to see a rise in insurance costs!
From all directions, it appears that this bill- attempting to relieve a fed-up America from the costs of its already vastly inefficient and incompetent healthcare system- would do far more harm than good if it passes in the Senate.
For more information: www.saveourscreenings.org