3

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3 million -- that’s the decrease in the number of middle-income earners who obtained health insurance from their employers from 2000 to 2008. [Source: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation]
And 3 times -- is how much faster health care premiums are rising compared to wages. [Source: Kaiser Family Foundation]

It’s no secret -- skyrocketing health care costs are crushing families and businesses, forcing small business owners to choose between health care and hiring and forcing families to make hard spending choices because of rising out-of-pocket health care costs. While our broken health care system is hurting everyone, it’s the middle class that’s being hit the hardest. Yesterday, the non-partisan Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released a report showing that the middle class became uninsured at a faster pace than those with less or more income.

Health insurance reform will change that by giving American families and small businesses more control over their own health care. While in Ohio earlier this week, President Obama detailed just what health insurance reform means for America’s middle class:

For the first time, uninsured individuals, small businesses, they’d have the same kind of choice of private health insurance that members of Congress get for themselves. Understand if this reform becomes law, members of Congress, they’ll be getting their insurance from the same place that the uninsured get theirs, because if it’s good enough for the American people, it’s good enough for the people who send us to Washington.

So basically what would happen is, we’d set up a pool of people; millions of people across the country would all buy into these pools that give them more negotiating power. If you work for a big company, you’ve got a better insurance deal because you’ve got more bargaining power as a whole. We want you to have all the bargaining power that the federal employees have, that big companies have, so you’ll be able to buy in or a small business will be able to buy into this pool. And that will lower rates, it’s estimated, by up to 14 to 20 percent over what you’re currently getting. That’s money out of pocket.

And what my proposal says is if you still can’t afford the insurance in this new marketplace, then we’re going to offer you tax credits to do so. And that will add up to the largest middle-class tax cut for health care in history. That’s what we’re going to do…

Look, I want everybody to understand -- the wealthiest among us can already buy the best insurance there is. The least well among us, the poorest among us, they get their health care through Medicaid. So it’s the middle class, it’s working people that are getting squeezed, and that’s who we have to help, and we can afford to do it.

Today’s number, 3, is the latest in ‘Health Reform by the Numbers,’ our online campaign to raise awareness about why the time is now for health insurance reform.You can follow the campaign on Whitehouse.gov and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn.

To help spread the word, share this blog post with your family, friends and online networks using the ‘Share/Bookmark’ feature below.

Previous Numbers:

9
50-50
1
41
625
8
1115"

Responsible and Paid For

Responsible and Paid For: "

Cross-posted from the OMB blog.

Today’s Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate of health insurance reform legislation reaffirms what we have said for the past year: that fiscally responsible health insurance reform is not only possible, but also is an important step toward long-term fiscal sustainability.

The new CBO estimate finds that health insurance reform will reduce the deficit by over $100 billion in this decade and by more than $1 trillion over the following 10 years. If enacted, this would be the most significant deficit-reduction package passed into law in over a decade. And it will begin to transform our health care system into one that delivers higher quality at lower cost, boosting the bottom lines of American businesses, families, and the federal government — all the while providing those with health insurance with new choices and a host of new consumer protections and expanding coverage to 32 million Americans.

By paying for itself and more, this legislation represents an important break from the way Washington has done business recently. In the first decade of this century, large, significant domestic policy initiatives—two tax cuts and a Medicare prescription drug benefit — were passed into law without being paid for, adding trillions to the deficit. That is why the President pushed for, and then signed into law, statutory pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) legislation that holds policymakers to a simple principle: if you propose new tax cuts or entitlement expansions, you must find a way to pay for them.

Some have raised concerns that the health insurance reform legislation may have fallen short of this PAYGO principle. That is simply false. CBO’s analysis shows that the combination of the Senate-passed bill and the reconciliation bill will be deficit-reducing according to statutory PAYGO standards — standards that go beyond simple deficit reduction.

In particular, the overall bill — including the Senate-passed bill and the reconciliation bill combined—generates over $100 billion in deficit reduction over the next decade (and more thereafter). For the purposes of statutory PAYGO, however, certain of the bill’s savings are not counted: namely, the deficit reduction coming from increased Social Security payroll tax revenues and from the CLASS Act, a long-term care program. But even excluding these components the combined bills generate a net reduction in the deficit, and thus are fully compliant with statutory PAYGO.

The CBO score today should leave no doubt that we are operating in a new fiscal era — one where we abide by our commitment to pay for new initiatives and take steps to restore fiscal responsibility by reining in the single biggest driver of our long-term shortfall.

Peter Orszag is Director of the Office of Management and Budget

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50/50

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If you’re an American under the age of 65, there’s roughly a 50/50 chance that you will find yourself without coverage at some point in the next decade.[Source]

President Obama first highlighted this staggering figure in a weekly address from this past September and detailed how, in our broken health care system, losing insurance can happen to anyone. At yesterday’s rally, the President reminded us of just how fragile the status quo really is:

Part of what makes this issue difficult is most of us do have health insurance, we still do. And so -- and so we kind of feel like, well, I don’t know, it’s kind of working for me; I’m not worrying too much. But what we have to understand is that what’s happened to Natoma, there but for the grace of God go any one of us. Anybody here, if you lost your job right now and after the COBRA ran out …



So let’s just think about -- think about if you lost your job right now. How many people here might have had a preexisting condition that would mean it’d be very hard to get health insurance on the individual market? Think about if you wanted to change jobs. Think about if you wanted to start your own business but you suddenly had to give up your health insurance on your job. Think about what happens if a child of yours, heaven forbid, got diagnosed with something that made it hard for them to insure.

For so many people, it may not be a problem right now but it’s going to be a problem later, at any point. And even if you’ve got good health insurance, what’s happening to your premiums? What’s happening to your co-payments? What’s happening to your deductible? They’re all going up. That’s money straight out of your pocket.

So the bottom line is this: The status quo on health care is simply unsustainable. We can’t have -- we can’t have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the American people.

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Today’s number – 50/50 – is the latest in our ‘Health Reform by the Numbers’ series, an online campaign to raise awareness about how we just can’t wait any longer for health insurance reform. You can follow the campaign on Whitehouse.gov and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn.

To help spread the word, share this blog post with your family, friends and online networks using the ‘Share/Bookmark’ feature below.

Previous Numbers:

1
41
625
8
1115"

1

1: "

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1 -- in every six dollars in the U.S. economy is spent on health care today. [Source]
If we do nothing, in 30 years, 1 out of every three dollars in our economy will be tied up in the health care system. [Source]

Yesterday, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute, non-partisan research organizations, released a report analyzing the cost of maintaining the status quo on health care. Here’s just a sample of what they believe we could be facing in the years ahead:

Families will face dramatically higher health care costs. Individual and family spending on premiums and out-of-pocket health care costs will increase significantly. Spending would jump 34 percent by 2015 and 79 percent by 2020.
Premiums will become increasingly expensive for employers and their workers. Premiums for both single and family policies would more than double by 2020, increasing from $4,800 to $10,300 for single policies, and from $12,100 to $25,600 for family policies.
Employers will see large increases in premium costs. Employer spending on premiums would increase from $430 billion in 2010 to $851 billion in 2020 -- a 98 percent increase.
Many small and medium sized firms would quit offering health care coverage to workers. As premiums nearly double, employees in small firms would see offers of health insurance almost cut in half, dropping from 41 percent of firms offering insurance in 2010 to 23 percent in 2020. Medium-sized firms would also cut offers of health insurance, dropping from 90 percent in 2010 to 75 percent in 2020.

It’s clear: the cost of doing nothing is too high. The time is now to reform our broken health care system.

Today’s number, 1, is the latest in ‘Health Reform by the Numbers,’ our online campaign to raise awareness about why the time is now for health insurance reform. You can follow the campaign on Whitehouse.gov and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn.

To help spread the word, share this blog post with your family, friends and online networks using the ‘Share/Bookmark’ feature below.

Previous Numbers:

41
625
8
1125"

625

625: "

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625 – That’s the number of people who lost their health insurance EVERY HOUR in 2009 [Source: WonkRoom.ThinkProgress.org]

Losing insurance – it can happen to anyone. We’ve all heard stories – maybe you know someone who’s recently lost their insurance, maybe that someone is you. President Obama has heard those stories too:

There's the father I met in Colorado whose child was diagnosed with severe hemophilia the day after he was born. Now, they had insurance, but there was a cap on their coverage. So once the child's medical bills began to pile up, the father was left to frantically search for another option, or face tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills.... Small business people -- I got a letter just this week from a small businessman. He said, "I don't know what to do. I've always provided health insurance for my families, but here, the attached bill, shows that the premiums have gone up 48 percent in the last year, and I think that I'm probably going to have to stop providing health insurance for my employees. I don't want to, but I don't have a choice."

These stories are wrong. They are heartbreaking. Nobody should be treated that way in the United States of America…

You can learn more about the family from Colorado in this video:

Click here to see the video.

It’s time to reform our broken health care system so that American families and businesses can get the stability and security they deserve.

Today’s number – 625 – is the third in our ‘Health Reform by the Numbers’ series, an online campaign to raise awareness about how we just can’t wait any longer for health insurance reform. You can follow the campaign on Whitehouse.gov and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn.

To help spread the word, share this blog post with your family, friends and online networks using the ‘Share/Bookmark’ feature below.

Previous Numbers:

8
1125

"