Here is a shout out to all you NPR fans out there!
I was listening to NPR yesterday morning and heard another story from their series called "Health Care: Are You Covered?"
I have realized over the past few weeks that I have been listening to these stories with great interest, so I wanted to share them.
The series is a set of personal stories from people all over the US about how they pay for health care costs for themselves and their families. It covers stories of people from the uninsured to people who have the best coverage one could ask for.
This website is where you can go to just listen to a few people and read their stories:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112867626
I think something like this is a good way of getting people's personal stories out there, for others to relate to and learn from. Let me know what you think!
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2 comments:
Hey Amy, I really like this link. We study so much of the insured, uninsured, those on medicaid, that it's true they become more like numbers and we see less of the face to the numbers. I especially like what the "voluntarily uninsured" woman said about insurance companies covering based on fairness and that if someone has higher blood pressure or a higher body fat that they would maybe pay more in premiums/deductibles and that since she skiis and snowboards, she would also maybe pay more. Although on the flip side I think it would be some what hard to get that kind of information from people who are applying for health insurance because of the whole idea of 'adverse selection' in which there is asymmetric information coming from the individuals side where they know what their risk is and they in effect purchase insurance at lower rates relative to their risk. Good idea, but hard to implement.
Thanks, Amy! It's really interesting to hear these stories straight from the mouths of those living them out. I was particularly interested in listening to what the people with "gold-plated" or "Cadillac" insurance plans had to say. NPR took an interesting approach in looking at this small part of the population that receives some of the best health insurance coverage in the US: they looked at one very wealthy family that voluntarily pays $20,000 per year for their premium, and another lower class family that pays only $60 for roughly the same insurance (the state pays for the rest). By looking at the issue of health care reform from these two very different families, it's easy to see why the "solution" of taxing these "gold-plated" plans is not as easy as it seems. While the wealthy family doesn't mind as much being taxed more so that others can receive insurance, the other family is hard pressed to figure out how their $30,000 salary can sustain any more taxes.
I'm sure in this health care debate, we've all already heard this before: "I know that there are people out there who have little or no insurance and need something better. On the other side, I don't want to give up what we've got, personally, for something significantly lesser to try to equalize."
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