What about some Answers?

We have been talking a lot about the problem of being uninsured and in your twenties, but what about some solutions to this growing problem. I was talking about this project with a co-worker who mentioned a program for young and uninsured Minnesotans. I also heard Dr. Vener mention this program in our interview.

Google: Images

Minnesota Care is a joint federal-state program that "provides subsidized health coverage to eligible Minnesotans." To qualify people must meet income limits and satisfy other requirements related to residency and lack of access to health insurance.
Children and parents, legal guardians, foster parents, or relative caretakers residing in the same household are eligible for Minnesota Care, if their total household income does not exceed 275 percent of the federal poverty guidelines.

So that means, if you live with your mom and dad, you just graduated college and you no longer qualify for their plan- your total income (all three of you) would have to be less than $48,400 per year. While Minnesota Care is one option, many 20-somethings already fail to meet this first requirement...and there are more.

Google: Images

Check out the link from the Minnesota House of Representatives, Research Department about Minnesota Care.

http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mncare.pdf

Below are a few links about the Minnesota Care health insurance program.

http://www.mnhealthnetwork.com/minnesota_care.htm

http://www.dhs.state.mn.us/main/idcplg?IdcService=GET_DYNAMIC_CONVERSION&RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased&Redirected=true&dDocName=id_006255

Hope this provides some answers.

-Randi L. Niklekaj

Best Health Plans Search - Minnesota

U.S. News and World Report recently ranked different insurance plans on terms on customer satisfaction, the level of care they were offered when needed, and what preventative services were offered. 250 health plans were ranked from across the country. Here is how Minnesota's plans were ranked.

#38
HealthPartners (HMO/POS)Minnesota

#66
Blue Plus (HMO/POS)Minnesota

#135
Medica (HMO/POS)Minnesota

#141
Sanford Health Plan of Minnesota (HMO)Minnesota

#233
PreferredOne Community Health Plan (POS)Minnesota

http://www.usnews.com/directories/health-plans/index_html/plan_cat+commercial/state_id+MN/plan_name+/+Search/sort+rank/detail+more/page_number+1/page_size+10/+undefined

One in 5 Students Remains Uninsured, Despite Colleges' Efforts

This story that ran in the Chronicle of Higher Education last month mentioned one of out five college students are uninsured across the country. Despite many colleges, like the University of Minnesota, requiring all students to have insurance, and offering them plans through the school, it's not working. Going off a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office on college students and health insurance, the article states reasons why some students don't have insurance.
"Students were more likely to be uninsured if they were from low-income families, attended college part-time, or were members of minority groups" were a few reasons they stated.
The article also mentions that 1.7 million students were uninsured in 2006. Senator Edward Kennedy, chairman of the U.S. Senate's Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions said recently that student health care should be a major concern to people across the country.
""Students must be healthy to learn," he said.
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/03/2308n.htm

Statistics On The Uninsured

In 2006, there were 47 million Americans without insurance.

In the same year, 22,000 people aged 25-64 died because they did not have adequate health insurance.

Throughout the United State, twice as many people died from lack of health insurance as died from being murdered.

Living without insurance is the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer in elderly people.

Dying For Coverage In Minnesota. Families USA. Washington D.C., 2008. http://www.familiesusa.org/assets/pdfs/dying-for-coverage/minnesota.pdf

383,000 Minnesotans do not have health insurance.

That is more than 9% of the state's population.

It would cost between $663-852 million dollars to cover all of the uninsured Minnesotans.

61% of uninsured Minnesotans have been uninsured for a year or more.

59% those uninsured in the state are eligible for public insurance programs but are not enrolled.

There are 66,000 uninsured children in Minnesota.

Yearly insurance coverage costs an average Minnesotan adult is almost $4,000.

Source: How Much Would It Cost to Cover the Uninsured in Minnesota. Minnesota Department of Health. 2006. .

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

84% of uninsured Minnesotans have at least one person in their family that works full or part time.

Minnesotans aged 19-26 years old make up the largest percent of the State’s uninsured with 18.7%.

About 1/3 of Hispanics in Minnesota do not have insurance.

If 100 people in Minnesota loses their job, 85 of them (including family members) also lose their health insurance.

A healthy 25 year old woman would have to pay about $1,595 a year for health insurance, averaging about 20-50% of her salary.

80% of Minnesotans living below the poverty level do not qualify for state Medicaid insurance programs.

Who's Uninsured in Minnesota and Why? Families USA. Washington D.C., 2003. ­­­­

At the Hospital with Dr. Vener

I interviewed Dr. Vener at the Sibley Medical Center. I also talked to an uninsured student and an insurance agent. I talked to Dr. Vener about hypothetical costs to uninsured and what he would or would not prescribe. I talked to University Student Karah Barr about being uninsured. My interview with Community Insurance Laurie Brockhoff was informational as well. See a 3 min package below.
Stay tuned for raw footage interviews...

-Randi L. Niklekaj

FYI: Attention young adults

FOR YOUR INFORMATION:

Check this site out. It is 2001 data of MN counties and uninsurance rates. Its a little old, but still important. Plus, this is important for my interview with the Sibley Medical Center in Sibley County, MN.

http://www.statecoverage.net/statereports/mn32.pdf


Also, more from Stefan at the MN Dept. of Health:


We are the right source for this information and it is indeed at our fingertips. However, the way this information is arrived at is via random probability survey. What that means is, similar to polling, you draw are representative sample and based on this derive an estimate. Because the survey was designed to produce statewide estimates, we only have sufficient sample for certain populous counties to generate statistically reliable estimates - Sibley County is not one of those.

Perhaps this helps: Sibley County is located in the South Central Minnesota region, for which we estimate an uninsurance rate in 2007 of 7 percent. This is statistically not different from the statewide rate of 7.2 percent. Again,we can't produce a rate that is specific for young adults. However, you may remember that the statewide estimate for uninsured young adults (18 to 24-year-olds) is 18.7 percent.


Stefan Gildemeister
Assistant Director, Health Economics Program Division of Health Policy
Minnesota Department of Health

-Randi L. Niklekaj

2007 Wallstreet Journal Article

I was researching information about uninsurance rates in Minnesota when I cam across this 2007 article in The Wall Street Journal:




Who Pays for Health Insurance?

By CLARK HAVIGHURST and BARAK RICHMAN September 6, 2007

New census data showing that the number of Americans without health insurance increased by 2.2 million in the past year (to 47 million) undoubtedly deserves the attention it is getting. But the increasing size of the uninsured population is only a symptom of deeper problems in American health care, not the problem itself. Indeed, concern for the uninsured obscures the plight of middle- and lower-income workers who do have health coverage but pay dearly for it.


In many cases, those who drop their health coverage do so for rational reasons. They apparently prefer to run some financial and health risks rather than pay for insurance that now costs the average family $12,000 annually. The American health-care system resembles all too closely an extortion scheme that forces individuals to either pay a very high price or put their families' health in danger. It is not surprising that many working Americans are deciding not to take it anymore.

Ironically, many more Americans would probably drop their health coverage if they knew how much it really costs them. But they don't know, because of the way the tax system treats health benefits. Under the current system, employers are the principal purchasers of health insurance, and workers seldom know how much their employers pay. They also don't realize what economists have repeatedly concluded: Employer outlays for health insurance translate directly into less take-home pay for employees.


Because the tax system has induced workers to believe that someone else was paying the bills for their care, they have pushed for better health benefits regardless of cost. Benefits have thus become more comprehensive and expensive than makes economic sense for most working families. Likewise, because voters haven't fully understood who pays for health care, they have supported laws and regulations that strongly reflect the values and interests of the health-care industry and its most affluent customers. Consequently, unlike ordinary consumer products, health coverage does not come in a range of models suited to different pocketbooks.

Weak consumer cost-consciousness has left the U.S. with private insurance that functions as a reverse Robin Hood scheme, taking from middle-income Americans to support a health system that benefits many elite interests. A significant fraction of the cost individuals incur for health coverage goes not to pay for care they and their families receive, but to support a variety of industry activities and projects, including medical education and research and the building of costly facilities. Even assuming the industry pursues only socially worthwhile goals, its otherwise uncompensated efforts should be financed by a fair system of taxation. At present, many such costs fall on premium payers like a regressive "head tax" rather than in proportion to their income or ability to pay.


Evidence also suggests that many benefits of health insurance, though paid for equally by everyone, flow disproportionately to the affluent. For example, cost-sharing requirements deter lower-income individuals from using their coverage more than they deter wealthy ones. The latter also know how to manipulate the system to obtain more and better services at plan expense. Legal mandates requiring insurers to cover such services as mental-health care and fertility treatment make available, at collective expense, benefits that the affluent are much more likely to use.
Particularly in view of the widening income gap between middle- and high-income earners, serious attention should be given to how the health-care system takes lots of money from the working class without giving them commensurate value for much of it. One does not have to be a populist to see the unfairness (as well as the tendency to increase the uninsured population) of forcing workers to pay unjustifiably high prices as a condition of being insured at all.

A good way to prepare the public for needed health reforms would be to expose consumers to the true cost of health insurance. President George W. Bush's pending proposal to tax the value of employees' health benefits as income, while also providing a compensating standard deduction or tax credit, would serve the useful purpose of stimulating market and political demand for low-cost alternatives, including coverage that stops short of paying for everything seemingly mandated by professional (that is, non-economic) standards.
Congress is making a mistake in ignoring the president's proposal. If voters realized that it is not only the uninsured whom the current system victimizes, would-be reformers of all stripes might finally find a broad constituency willing to support fundamental change.


Messrs. Havighurst and Richman are professors at Duke Law School.




I am not sure our health care system and insurance system works for anybody...-Randi L. Niklekaj