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WASHINGTON – The number of Hoosiers who get their health insurance through their employer is dwindling, especially among workers at small businesses, as the cost of family premiums has doubled in less than a decade, the Obama administration said Friday.
The Department of Health and Human Services issued a flurry of statistics for each state aimed at underscoring President Obama’s argument that “inaction is not an option.”
“In states across the country, health care costs are going up, and families are struggling to get the quality care they need and deserve,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a conference call with reporters. “We cannot wait to pass reform that protects what works about health care and fixes what’s broken.”
Part of what’s broken in Indiana, the agency said, is the rapidly increasing cost of health insurance and the pinch it puts on employers and workers.
Obama supports a government-run health insurance program to compete with private insurers. Congressional committees have been wrestling with writing a bill that would cost less than $1 trillion over 10 years.
Sebelius said about two-thirds of Hoosiers get insurance coverage through their employer, a decrease from 72 percent almost a decade ago. Employment-based insurance is higher in Indiana than in the nation as a whole. In 1999, the government said, 64 percent of Americans got insurance from their employers, and 59 percent did in 2007.
Sebelius cited government studies showing that the number of Hoosiers without insurance has increased from 9 percent in 1999 to 11.4 percent in 2007. Nationally, the percentage of uninsured grew more slowly, from 14 percent in 1999 to 15.3 percent last year.
In the weekly radio address he will deliver today, Obama says he gets letters daily from Americans who “can’t keep up with crushing health care costs that are rising three times faster than wages.”
The statistics Sebelius issued Friday said family premiums are projected to be $13,252 this year, double what they were in 2000. A person working full time for the minimum wage will earn $15,080 after the hourly rate goes to $7.25 next month.
In his radio address, Obama thanks the pharmaceutical industry, doctors, hospitals, labor unions, businesses and insurers for agreeing to “do their part to decrease the annual health care spending growth rate by 1.5 percentage points – saving $2 trillion or more over the next decade.”
“What they all recognize is that health care reform is no longer a luxury but a necessity we can’t postpone any longer.”
