I"ll never forget the look on my mother's face that day at the pharmacy. Our insurance company's server was down, which meant she"d have to pay full price for my prescription. As always, my being sick had worried her, but I think paying sixty dollars for a little box of just ten pills took years off her life. In the state of Texas alone there are 1.4 million children without health-care insurance (TexCare), and every time one of these children picks up a bug at daycare he/she sees the same expression on their parents" faces as I saw on my mother's. .
So what's going on? It's a domino affect that starts with the rising cost of health care. Health care costs have increased by leaps and bounds, due to the use of expensive, technologically advanced equipment in treatments and the high cost of malpractice insurance for health-care providers, not to mention the need for pharmaceutical companies to recoup their research and development costs before they lose their five-year exclusive patents. Insurance companies have to pay claims based on these increased costs, so they raise premiums. Then, employers have to pay the high premiums to provide coverage for their employees. .
Although federal law requires companies with more than eight employees to provide health insurance for the workers, the skyrocketing premium costs have caused many businesses to employ creative means to avoid providing insurance whenever possible. For instance, companies may hire two part-time employees to fill one fulltime position, because part-time employees usually are not eligible for benefits. Whereas once it was the norm for a company to pay for coverage on its workers and their dependents, today's high costs have changed the scenario considerably. Most companies still pay the premium, or most of it, on their worker, but few companies still pay the premium for dependent coverage. It is up to the employee to pay $100, as in the case of my sister-in-law, to $200 per paycheck, which my parents have to pay, to provide coverage for their families.
