Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 27, 1992 TAG: 9201270084
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL TAYLOR THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: ST. LOUIS LENGTH: Medium
HEALTH BENEFITS DICTATE MORE LIFE DECISIONS
Two years ago Jeff and Cynthia Wilkerson decided it was the perfect time to have a baby. He had just gotten a job as an art director at an ad agency, and it offered "the best health coverage we've ever had - no deductibles," Jeff recalled."We figured, `We're set,' " said Cynthia, 28, who, like millions of Americans in this recession, finds that more of life's choices - from teeth-cleaning to baby-making - are influenced by the availability of health coverage.
Five months into Cynthia's pregnancy, Jeff was laid off. He was able to find another job within a matter of weeks. But his wife's pregnancy wasn't covered under his new employer's health-insurance plan, because it was deemed a pre-existing condition - a designation that insurers are resorting to with increasing regularity to contain their costs.
The Wilkersons' son, Dylan, was born Nov. 2, 1990, with a defective heart. The couple has been through a harrowing odyssey ever since to make sure they have insurance to cover his medical bills, which have already run into six figures.
They've managed to pull it off so far, but in the process their premiums tripled to $450 a month - making it impossible for them to make ends meet on Jeff's $28,000-a-year salary. They've fallen $3,000 in debt on credit cards, had to borrow from Jeff's mother to pay their taxes last year and even considered declaring bankruptcy.
"We talked to a lawyer who said we should just hang in there and change our phone number so the creditors couldn't find us," Cynthia said.
The Wilkersons are neither unemployed nor uninsured nor bankrupt. Officially, they aren't statistics in this recession. But the perils they've faced in the never-never land where job uncertainty and rising health-care costs intersect help explain why this recession has packed more of a wallop - economic as well as psychological - than the statistics suggest.
In 1980, the average family paid $1 out of every $11 of its income for health care-in the form of out-of-pocket costs, insurance premiums or taxes. By 1991, according to Families USA, an advocacy group pushing for health care reform, the average family was paying $1 out of every $8.50 in health-care costs - a 30 percent increase at a time when real family income was flat.
During the same decade, the number of Americans without insurance grew to 34 million, from 24.5 million. And during this recession, when nearly one worker out of five went through a spell of unemployment last year alone, tens of millions more Americans have faced the prospect of losing their coverage entirely or having it downgraded.
"To be truly at risk of poverty in our society in the late 20th century is not to have health insurance," said Joshua Wiener, a health economist at the Brookings Institution. "One of the things about this recession that's different from the 1982 recession" - when the unemployment rate peaked at 10.8 percent, compared with today's 7.1 percent - "is that insurers have become much more restrictive about who and what they'll cover. So when you lose your job, or even when you fear losing your job, there's an added risk you face that wasn't around a decade ago. It's one of the reasons there seems to be more economic insecurity than the numbers in the recession would warrant."
According to a Washington Post-ABC News survey taken last month, 24 percent of Americans said either they or a member of their family had decided to stay put in a job in the past two years primarily because they feared their health benefits wouldn't be as good if they changed jobs.