By Jim McLean
KHI News Service
TOPEKA, Jan. 11
A first step in devising a plan to cover the approximately 300,000 Kansans who lack medical insurance is to understand who they are and why they lack coverage.
The Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee began grappling with those questions Thursday.
Sheldon Weisgrau, a policy analyst for the Kansas Health Institute, briefed the committee on a recent survey on the uninsured. He said a couple of findings stand out about the 11 percent of the state”s population that is uninsured.
First, about 25 percent of young adults between ages 18 and 25 are uninsured. Second, About 30 percent of the state”s Hispanic population lacks coverage.
Weisgrau said many of the young adults who are uninsured work, but choose not to purchase coverage.
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“If you”re young and healthy it”s easy to justify not purchasing insurance,” Weisgrau said.
Asked why such a high proportion of the state”s Hispanic residents lack insurance, Weisgrau said, “It”s mostly because many of them tend to work in jobs that don”t offer it.”
Another disquieting trend, Weisgrau said, is a steady decline in the number of employers offering insurance benefits to their workers, from 69 percent in 2000 to 61 percent in 2006.
Over the same time period, Weisgrau said, the average cost of an employer-sponsored family insurance policy
rose 81 percent, climbing from $6,351 a year to $11,480.
“Health care inflation is substantially higher than inflation in other sectors of the economy,” Weisgrau said, noting that the increase in health premiums was more than four times the rate of inflation and the increase in worker’s earnings over that period.
Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, in her State of the State address Wednesday, called on legislators and members of the Kansas Health Policy Authority to work with her this year to devise a plan for covering all of the uninsured.
On Thursday, Sen. Jim Barnett, R-Emporia, chairman of two legislative health committees and a health task force, said the governor”s goal was unaffordable. But he said, “I would like to see the state of Kansas reduce the uninsured by half.”
He said working to enroll more already-eligible low- and moderate-income children in government health programs, allowing Kansans to purchase health coverage with pre-tax dollars and making insurance more portable so that people don”t lose it when they change jobs are policies he believes can help achieve that goal.
In a statement released Thursday in response to the governor”s speech, Marcia Nielsen, executive director of the Health Policy Authority, said the board that governs the independent agency had adopted vision principles that “embraced the idea that all Kansans should have access to patient-centered care.”
Nielsen added, “We stand ready to work with the governor, Legislature and stakeholders to focus on common sense health reform that works for Kansans.”
The Health Policy Authority was created by the Legislature to develop and coordinate state health policy. Its administrative responsibilities include running the Medicaid, State Children”s Health Insurance and state employee health programs.
Jim McLean is a staff writer for KHI News Service, which specializes in coverage of health issues facing Kansans. He can be reached at
jmclean@khi.org
or at 785-233-5443, ext. 110.