Where to Go From Here

It may seem like there is no aspect of our country that isn’t an utter mess right now. Big banks are being bailed out, the auto industry is flailing like a car in the river and as we see here, the health care industry is rapidly falling ill to this economic virus. Is there any hope? I feel that there is. We have a new President with new ways of thinking around how health care and insurance should be offered, and while I don’t hang my hat on things changing immensely and immediately after the old administration departs, I do think they are on course to change for the better. How much worse can it get? The road to change has to be one we travel.

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Health care providers have to have seen this coming. It’s not like we woke up one morning and saw “Hey, the country’s in a recession.” The economic downturn was gradual and glaringly obvious, and people and organizations everywhere did their best to make preparations. However, many states throughout the United States are preparing to make drastic and unprecedented cuts in health care funds, and this couldn’t be coming at a worse time for consumers. The unemployment rate in December was 7.2%, which was up from November’s 6.8%. There doesn’t seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel any time soon (you can’t help but feel bad for the complete mess that Barack Obama is inheriting) and it is important to know how these health care cuts might affect you and your family.

Health Services for Poor First to Go

Obama has been promising since the inception of his campaign that he wanted to extend health care coverage to include more affordable and widely available health insurance to those in lower income brackets. Now, before he has even been sworn in as the next President of the United States, states are already tossing programs like these out the window. Many states have been gung-ho in the fight to expand their coverage for the working poor, but with the state of the economy the way it is, these once hopeful programs are getting the boot. And the working poor are now becoming more steadily just the “poor,” as jobs continued to get slashed across industries.

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If you’ve never lost your job, you may not have ever heard of COBRA. COBRA is a health insurance plan that allows an employee who leaves a company for any reason to continue to be covered under the company’s health plan for a certain period of time. The name results from the fact that the program was created under the Consolidated Omnibus Reconciliation, and the system exists so that employees in between jobs can keep their coverage until they can hop into something new. This sounds just ducky, and it is definitely a nice option to have, people will find themselves paying full-price on all premiums for their coverage. They may still have the health insurance they’ve grown so accustomed to, but they’ll be paying out the wazoo for it.

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The new stimulus package includes subsidies to help pay for COBRA insurance coverage to those who have lost their jobs in our current economic hard times. This could be a welcome safety blanket for those who need a little extra monetary help while looking for a new job.

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It is no secret that I am a huge proponent of a universal health care system being instituted in the United States. If you have followed my blogs on medhealthinsurance.com at all, I somehow often manage to slip in a little blip about universal health care and all its glory, even if I’m talking about something as seemingly mundane as doctor’s visits. It is also no secret that this country is slipping deeper and deeper into a financial maelstrom. Experts may still be calling it a recession, but we are just a hop, skip and a jump away from a full-blown depression.

If we want to avoid an economic situation similar to that in the 1930’s, the government needs to do something, and fast. Obviously, the economic stimulus packages didn’t do what they were supposed to do, though I did enjoy having the extra money to fly home and see family in California. Borrowing more money and throwing it at the American consumers in hopes of “shoring up the economy” is a plan that just doesn’t seem to be working, and another path needs to be taken. And as you will see in the rest of this post, a universal health care plan might just be that path we need to sprint down.

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