Must-read: Richard Mayhew: “CHIPPING Away at Uninsurance”
: CHIPPING Away at Uninsurance: “The Arkansas Times named its person of the year…
…all the Arkansans who are newly insured. There was one vignette that stuck with me:
The average high school senior isn’t too worried about insurance coverage, but for Fairfield Bay native Crystal Bles, it was a priority…. While many young adults now rely on their parents’ insurance to stay covered until age 26–thanks to another change created by the Affordable Care Act–Bles’ parents were uninsured…. She ‘most definitely’ knew she needed coverage, she said, given her chosen area of study. ‘In welding, people tend to get injured.’… For young Arkansans like Bles, the private option has already become a fact of life [my emphasis]— a vital government service, funded by taxpayers and provided for taxpayers, just like public schools and food stamps, highways and Pell grants, law enforcement and libraries.
There have been numerous liberal attempts to slowly build… by proposals to lower Medicare eligibility age. The theory… is that taking the most expensive people off of the private market… will save money systemically and not face significant opposition as employers and private insurers will want to dump their most expensive covered lives to someone else… anything that shifts people from the most expensive part of the covered system (employer sponsored insurance) to a less expensive part (Medicare) is a big win. The final part of the theory… is that the change to Medicare for 60 year old individuals works well and is not too scary so the next slice of the salami….
What if we are trying to cut the salami from the wrong end? Kids are adorable, sympathetic and, after they start crawling, dirt cheap to cover. Kids use lots of low cost services but they are unlikely to need high cost services. What if the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (CHIP) was expanded to be the most probable insurance to every kid between the ages of birth and nineteen?