^{Posted on May 4, 2006}

Cover the uninsured

New Jersey, EDITORIAL
Sunday, April 30, 2006

Tomorrow begins the fourth Cover the Uninsured Week, a nonpartisan, national effort to urge U.S. leaders to make health coverage for Americans their top priority and to facilitate the enrollment of uninsured people who are eligible for subsidized health-care programs. With some 1,000 public events scheduled nationwide, Cover the Uninsured Week will be the largest such campaign in history. Among those who will make the case for national solutions in forums in Washington, D.C., and around the nation will be business leaders who will describe how rising health expenses limit their ability to provide health insurance for their employees and drive up the cost of competing on a global basis.

Nearly 46 million Americans lack health coverage. New Jersey feels the consequences more harshly than most; our state ranks ninth among the states in the percentage of its residents who are uninsured, according to a report issued last Wednesday by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, one of the chief sponsors of Cover the Uninsured Week. The state’s 1.3 million uninsured — 15.3 percent of its population — are four times more likely than its insured residents to have no personal physician or health-care provider, which makes them less likely to receive preventive services, such as mammograms, pap smears, prostate screening tests and colonoscopies. That, in turn, leads to sickness that costs many times to treat — usually at public expense — than the cost of prevention would have been. A similar report last week by the Commonwealth Fund showed a rising number of uninsured among moderate-income and middle-income families: Two in five working-age Americans with annual incomes between $20,000 and $40,000 were uninsured for at least part of 2005, the report said, and 70 percent of the uninsured were in families with at least one working adult.

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Many states are intervening on behalf of their citizens. Earlier this month, for example, Massachusetts forged a bipartisan coalition to adopt the nation’s first universal health-insurance law, requiring all residents to obtain coverage and providing ways to make that coverage affordable for everyone. It’s encouraging that two of New Jersey’s legislative leaders on health care, Sen. Joseph Vitale, D-Woodbridge, and Assemblyman Neil Cohen, D-Union, have promised to meet with employers, consumer groups, insurance firms, hospitals, doctors, drug firms and other key players over the next six months to determine whether the Massachusetts approach could be adapted for this state, possibly as an expansion of New Jersey’s existing FamilyCare program, which provides health coverage to 139,000 working-poor parents and 112,000 children.

Bravo for the states that are trying. But the problem is a national one and must be solved nationally. Our preference, as we have said many times, is for a single-payer system like Canada’s that eliminates the administrative costs that make up such an enormous part of the overall cost of health care. However, any serious attempt by Congress and the White House to cover America’s uninsured would be vastly preferable to the indifference they display today.