Philadelphia Unemployment Project

Compiled by Diana Tung, PUP Organizing Intern from Bryn Mawr College.
Push to expand CHIP for young adults

According to the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund, adults aged 19 to 29 are the biggest group of the newly uninsured, making up 30 percent of the 45 million Americans without health insurance in 2005. Many of these young adults who are entering the workforce for the first time are unable to afford the high cost of individual insurance. Instead, they are left to fend for themselves as US employers are increasingly opting not to offer health insurance. In addition to having no healthcare support, 40 percent of the uninsured young live in households earning below the federal poverty level.

Seventeen U.S. states have already passed laws requiring insurance companies to cover dependent children until at least age 24. On the federal level, a bill in the House of Representatives to expand the states’ Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) would cover kids and young adults up to age 25 in families that are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. Currently, benefits under S-CHIP, which covers about 6.6 million people, and Medicaid, which covers about 50 million children and adults, expire at age 19. Most Democratic lawmakers support some expansion of the program, but Republicans have criticized the adult provision as overly generous. President George W. Bush has threatened to veto the bill, arguing it would lead to government-controlled healthcare.

What President Bush doesn’t realize is that government-controlled healthcare really isn’t such a bad thing- at least not when looking at the healthcare systems of other industrialized countries such as Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the UK. In yesterday’s New York Times the editorial wrote about the embarrassing state of the U.S.’s healthcare system as published by the WHO and the Commonwealth Fund. Our healthcare system is seriously lagging behind other countries in categories such as insurance coverage, access to healthcare, fairness in treatment, patient satisfaction and care for chronically ill patients. Despite President Bush’s optimistic view of us having the “the best health care system in the world,” or even the “best medical care in the world” according to Rudolph Giuliani, American doctors and hospitals kill patients through surgical and medical mistakes more often than their counterparts in other industrialized nations.

From The Times editorial:

With health care emerging as a major issue in the presidential campaign and in Congress it will be important to get beyond empty boasts. The main goal should be to reduce the huge number of uninsured, who are a major reason for our poor standing globally. There is also plenty of room to improve our coordination of care, our use of computerized records, communications between doctors and patients, and dozens of other factors that impair the quality of care. The world’s most powerful economy should be able to provide a health care system that really is the best.