STEP FORWARD - Shriver Center

By Margaret Stapleton, Senior Attorney

Lots of things about health insurance are ironic. Example: Getting health care (which prevents more serious trouble or restores health) can trigger difficulties staying insured due to premium adjustments upward and preexisting-condition exclusions if the patient needs to change insurance plans. 

But the biggest irony is that, in some states, it’s okay for insurers to look at information of questionable relevance (past medical treatment), but now nowhere in the United States is it okay to look at information of quite certain relevance (genetic test results).  (more…)

By John Bouman, President

Nine years ago, Chicagoan Mark Emerson left his job with a large company that offered group health coverage to pursue the American dream and start his own business. He did not know that this would begin his ordeal of what he now calls “being charged back into the stone age” as a customer of the private health insurance market. Mark and his wife pay more in health care costs than they do on their mortgage payments and real estate taxes. Ironically, Mark and his wife are healthy people, but their health insurance costs still have escalated. Though he has reached the point where he can no longer afford his premiums, Mark is unwilling to drop coverage and face the potential nightmare of going without insurance. He feels stuck, and help is nowhere to be found. (more…)

By Melissa Cubria, Health Policy Advocate

“This is their job. They are in office to serve the people, so SERVE THE PEOPLE!” says Maria, a small-business owner from Chicago, about her state legislators. Maria is one of the millions of Illinois constituents frustrated with the fractured health care system. The slowing financial market made money tight around Maria’s household, and she found it increasingly difficult to pay her monthly health insurance premiums despite her very comfortable income. Eventually she had to drop her health insurance altogether because it was simply unaffordable. Count her among the ranks of the 1.4 million uninsured adults in Illinois.

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By John Bouman, President

Tens of thousands of people die every year because they do not have health insurance-twice as many as are victims of homicides. This is the most shocking of the many reasons why the nation needs to quit stalling and get to work to accomplish comprehensive health care reform.

Families USA has just released a new analysis that estimates that 22,000 people died in 2006 because they did not have coverage. Uninsured people die before their time because they go without screenings and preventive care and delay or forego care they know they need.

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