Rising health insurance costs far outpace wage growth for Florida workers : Kate Santich

If it seems as though health-insurance premiums are skyrocketing while wages are barely limping along, they are.

The average working Floridian is paying more than twice as much for health insurance now compared with a decade ago ' though paychecks for the same period increased by only 27 percent, according to research released Thursday.

Add in higher out-of-pocket costs for deductibles, co-payments and services not covered by insurance, and a new report by Families USA says, "it is clear why many Florida families feel worse off economically than they did a decade ago."

"Increasingly, businesses and families are being priced out of health care," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, the nonprofit, nonpartisan group that released the findings. "The absence of health-care reform is unaffordable and unacceptable."

In a teleconference with Florida U.S. Reps. Kendrick Meek and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, both Democrats, Pollack said the research should bolster support for health-care reform. Without it, the speakers said, more Florida businesses will drop their group health-insurance policies, and more Florida families will face financial ruin.

Last year, Wasserman Schultz said, there were 1,210 health-care-related bankruptcies in her South Florida district alone.

The advocacy group has previously released data showing about 5.8 million Floridians are uninsured, many of them having lost insurance when they lost their jobs. But a growing number of full-time workers can't get health insurance through their employers, either because they can no longer afford the premiums or because their employers no longer offer a group policy.

Tara Babcock, a 30-year-old mother of two from Tavares, has a family health-insurance plan that consists largely of prayer and charity. Though her husband works full time at a local restaurant, he has no health insurance through his job. And even if he did, she said, the couple can't afford even modest co-payments or deductibles.

She has multiple sclerosis and can't work. Her 9-year-old son has asthma and is nearly blind. If he hadn't received glasses through a nonprofit program at his school, Babcock doesn't know what she would have done.

As it is, she manages his asthma by trying to keep him indoors and away from cigarette smoke.

"We survive by the grace of God," she said.

For businesses that still offer insurance, the costs have gone up, too. The average employer's share of health-care premiums has risen nearly $4,000 in the past decade for each worker who has family coverage ' about an 82 percent increase.

Researchers cited several reasons behind the soaring premiums, including wasteful health-care spending, an almost-unregulated insurance market, a dramatic drop in competition among insurers and cost shifts from the uninsured ' the so-called "hidden health tax."

As the ranks of the unemployed and uninsured have grown, health-care providers have tried to recoup their losses from treating the uninsured by passing along the costs to those who can still pay, the report's authors said.

But another factor driving up costs is utilization. Simply put, people go to the doctor more than they used to, they have more tests and procedures, and they use more prescription drugs. Nearly half of Americans now have at least one chronic condition, most commonly diabetes, heart disease or asthma.

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