During the second presidential debate in the fall of 2000, moderator Jim Lehrer brought up an issue that frequently goes unmentioned, but has an immediate and direct impact on one out of every six people in the United States.
“[B]oth of you have talked much about Medicare and health care for seniors,” Lehrer said. “What about the more than 40 million younger Americans who do not have health insurance right now? What would you do about that?”
George W. Bush, with his patent smirk, said, “Well, I’ve got a plan to do something about that.” He gave a lengthy, if somewhat rambling, answer detailing his commitment to “community health centers,” tax cuts, and some bizarre plan to “pool purchasing power” through matching funds for “children’s health insurance money.”
Three years later, if Bush has a “plan” to do something about the number of uninsured Americans, he’s kept it a secret. The number of people without health insurance in this country has grown to 43.6 million, having jumped by 2 million since Bush’s inauguration day. What’s worse, as federal aid to states is curtailed, most state governments are cutting back on health care spending to help balance their budgets.
As the LA Times’ Ron Brownstein noted today in a frightening column:
The share of Americans receiving health coverage from their employers has declined in each of the last two years, as higher premiums encourage businesses to either pass on more of the bill to their workers (which means fewer buy insurance) or drop coverage altogether.
The only reason the number of Americans without insurance hasn’t increased even faster is that public programs, like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, are providing coverage to nearly 4 million more people today than in 2000, many of them children.
But now the public programs are facing debilitating cutbacks too. And the result will be a continuing rise in the number of uninsured Americans — even if the recovering economy slows the loss of health insurance on the job.
Specifically, Brownstein was citing a new study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities which explains that “in response to budget pressures, states have taken actions that are reducing the number of low-income people covered by Medicaid, SCHIP and other health insurance programs by 1.2 to 1.6 million people, with almost half of those losing coverage being children.”
This is clearly worse than the states’ reaction during the recession during the first President Bush’s first term. Despite the so-called recovery we’re supposed to be enjoying right now, states appear to be in worse shape now than ever.
Most states are making a series of health care cuts, but some are being harder hit than others. As Brownstein noted, six states — Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Montana, and Utah — have “frozen enrollment in the CHIPs program and declared that they will not cover any more eligible children.” California, under Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “leadership,” is about to become number seven on this list.
I know there’s some debate over which issues will be the strongest on which to challenge Bush next year, but the crisis in access to health care seems to me to be an issue that should be near the top on the Dems’ list.