Health Care Reform Begins - Taking the Hill
By MATT BAI
Sometime in the next few weeks, Congress and the White House will descend into the labyrinthine politics of comprehensive health care reform. For Barack Obama, this signals the end, in a sense, of the eventful prologue to his presidency. Impressive as they are, Obama’s legislative victories to this point — most notably the $787 billion stimulus bill and a stunningly ambitious $3.6 trillion budget resolution — have been relatively easy lifts for a popular new president installed at a time of economic crisis and buffered by comfortable majorities in the House and Senate. Facing a fight on health care — and trying to avoid the mistakes of the past — President Obama’s team is working Congress from the inside.

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Uninsured Health Care Costs are a ‘Hidden Tax’ all Insured Americans are already paying in their Health Care Insurance Premiums

WASHINGTON -- The average family with health insurance shells out an extra $1,000 a year in premiums to pay for health care for the uninsured, a new study finds.

KEY FINDINGS just released:

While people without health insurance often delay or forgo care, in 2008, the uninsured received $116 billion worth of care from hospitals, doctors, and other providers. Those costs were covered in the following ways:

The uninsured paid for, on average, more than one-third (37 percent) of the total costs of the care they received out of their own pockets.

• Third-party sources, such as government programs and charities, paid for another 26 percent of that care.
  
• The remaining amount, approximately $42.7 billion in 2008, was unpaid and constituted uncompensated care.

To make up for this uncompensated care, the costs were shifted to insurers in the form of higher charges for health services. These higher charges are then passed on to families and businesses as higher premiums. The impact of this hidden health tax on annual premiums for families and individuals in 2008 was as follows:

• For family health care coverage, the hidden health tax was $1,017.
  
• For health coverage provided to single individuals, the hidden health tax was $368.

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