Increasing the Number of Uninsured

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has released a new study by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber showing that President Bush’s proposal to expand Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) would actually increase the total number of uninsured people in the United States. While 3.8 million people would gain coverage, another 4.4 million would actually lose coverage as a number of employers responded to the new tax breaks by dropping their insurance plans. So on net, more people are uninsured. And this all comes at a cost of $156 billion over ten years. Absolutely brilliant.

Now from what I understand, it seems like Gruber’s arguing that those 4.4 million would actually see little or no change in real compensation—what will happen is that many small businesses will just prefer to pay their workers in wages rather than health insurance once the tax advantages towards doing the latter disappear—and those 4.4 million would simply choose not to buy insurance. So it’s not clear that the situation is entirely catastrophic. (Although those 4.4 million would all likely be relatively healthy people, and their exit from the insurance pool would raise premiums for everyone else.)

Still, we know that HSAs won’t reduce total health care costs (how could they, when 80 percent of costs in this country are due to 20 percent of all patients, and that small minority simply can’t and won’t control their costs by taking out a high deductible?). They do virtually nothing to address the main health care problem in this country: that 60 million people go uninsured in any given year. Besides which, they transfer the costs of health care from the healthy and wealthy to the sick and the poor. In what universe is this a good use of money? We already have a perfectly good single-payer system in this country—Medicare—that, despite Republican efforts to screw it up, does a wonderful job of controlling costs and achieving universal among a vulnerable and expensive population group. A serious health care proposal might look at expanding that rather than tinkering around with frivolous tax breaks at the margins.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate