Unhealthy assurances
Without serious remedies, lack of health insurance will pose growing threat to social fabric of Pierce County

RICK ALLEN
Published in The News Tribune: May 14th, 2006

Let me begin with a story that is likely shared by many small-business owners.

Shortly after the dot-com stock market crash and then Sept. 11, United Way of Pierce County was faced with a budget issue. Donations to United Way to help distressed individuals and families were in a stall, simply because there were fewer people able to make donations.

The large Northwest dot-com industry and the airline industry were struggling. So were many of the businesses that would normally support and provide service to the employees of those companies. The region and nation had fallen into recession.

United Way, like any other business, had to cut costs. We were looking at all the options, including obtaining less-expensive health insurance coverage for our employees.

There we were, an agency designed to help people get things like better health care, and we were sacrificing employee health care, among many other things, to make sure our business remained viable in lean times.

Fortunately, our great employees sat down with management and helped us come to conclusions that we all agreed weren’t what we wanted to happen, but we all agreed were the best solutions given the circumstances.

We did things like increase the “co-pay” amount employees had to pay and increase the deductible the employee would have to pay over a year’s time.

At the same time, we were in the process of completing and analyzing a year-long human services assessment for Pierce County. In that assessment, we learned that our organizational issue with health care was just a minor part of a much bigger story.

Residents of Pierce County told us that access to health care was one of the biggest issues facing our citizens and that we at United Way needed to begin to pay closer attention and to play a bigger role in advocating for changes resulting in better health care.

We learned, for instance, that about 100,000 people are uninsured in Pierce County alone, and the number of uninsured all across America has grown rapidly since 2000.

Of those in Pierce County, about 50,000 are employed (most in small businesses or part-time without benefits), approximately 40,000 are unemployed with no insurance and approximately 15,000 children are uninsured.

In other words, there are nearly as many employed with no insurance as there are unemployed with no insurance. They were an illness away from disaster.

Through further study, we learned that most of the owners of those businesses agonized over their inability to provide this benefit.

We learned that emergency rooms all over Pierce County are becoming the first source of primary health care for literally thousands of people.

These folks without preventive health care access have to wait until they are seriously ill to get help in the nearest emergency room.

This unreimbursed emergency care is costing Pierce County hospitals upwards of $50 million (yes, $50 million) a year.

We learned that somewhere near 50 percent of all bankruptcies are related to a major illness or health care costs.

We learned that thousands of Pierce County children are unable to see a dentist. For many kids, their first time in a dental chair is at the age of 10 or 12, and they are having permanent teeth pulled or root canals. Think they’ll be back?

We learned that hundreds of mothers with unborn babies have no prenatal care, and that the short-term and long-term health of these babies is tremendously worse than average. These children then go to school unprepared to learn and are slow to develop, and many end up as dropouts or worse.

Bottom line: The crisis in health care access is costing some people their lives, denying many people a good quality of life and costing the rest of us a lot of money in social costs.

So what is United Way doing in the health insurance business? We are doing what our citizens and our donors have asked us to do, which is to help find ways to make sure people who need health care get health care and people who need health insurance somehow get health insurance.

Locally, we are supporting programs that extend health care to individuals in distress.

We are also looking at options being considered at the state and federal level and deciding whether or not to put the “power of the people” to work, through advocacy, supporting positive changes.

The issue of health care access is expensive, complex and contentious, but that’s no reason to play it safe. If we play it safe, it is likely to mean a child somewhere in Pierce County dies.

We are looking for common ground, for the common good. It’s a responsibility we have to our citizens and our donors, who are looking for us to accomplish our real mission: to measurably improve the lives of people in our community.