By NYCeve (Eve Gittelson)

Several months ago there was an important (and tragic) article in the Boston Globe about American with insurance being priced out of medical care. This reality takes on new meaning as we’re learning from another new report that perhaps up to 45,000 Americans die prematurely every year simply because they don’t have health insurance coverage at all!

People without health insurance are 40 percent more likely to die than those with private insurance, according to a new study whose authors say the finding underscores the need to expand coverage to the 46 million who lack it.

According to the report, published today in the Journal of Public Health, lack of health insurance was a factor in the death of as many as 45,000 people in 2 005.

These ghastly new numbers are indisputable. Even those Americans like some of us, with very expensive junk insurance are unable to seek medical care in a timely fashion due to spiraling out of pocket costs. Escalating co-pays, deductibles and declining reimbursement make a routine trip to the doctor, a luxury purchase even many with insurance can no longer consider.

This is the phenomenon known as “think you’re insured, think again”. Let’s take a look at the financial plight insured families faces, this might shed some additional light on the realities faced by the even worse off uninsured.

Costs are keeping patients from care: Copayments rise as families struggle

People with robust health insurance are putting off doctors’ appointments and skimping on prescriptions because they can’t afford the increasing costs of copayments and deductibles, according to managers of patient-assistance hot lines in Massachusetts.

Not that long ago, such dilemmas were typically faced by lower-income families, often on publicly subsidized insurance. But with many consumers struggling to pay rising healthcare costs amid today’s shrinking family budgets, these tough choices are becoming commonplace – even among families with employer-provided health insurance, consumer advocates say.

So here we are, good, tax-paying, heavily insured middle class Americans. We pay so much for this worth less insurance, that we make all manner of sacrifice just to pony up that exorbitant premium every damn month.

But despite doing this—working hard and playing by the rules, (and in Massachusetts facing a fine, if you refuse to play along), we still cannot afford routine medical care. And keep in mind, Max Baucus is also proposing to fine people who don’t purchase private, for-profit insurance.

Fines or no fines, the larger issue remains, will the Senate Finance proposal, make purchasing real health insurance coverage affordable? Well not if the stock prices of health insurer stocks is any indication.

Mandates. Fines. No public option, little or no cost control. The dream of Wall Street and the insurance industry. Fifty million new victims customers.

Baucus also dropped a plan to set up a government insurance program — the so-called public option — to compete with private insurers. Instead, he proposed giving $6 billion in seed money to nonprofit cooperatives that would compete with companies such as Hartford, Connecticut-based Aetna Inc.

Insurer stocks rose on the news, with the Standard & Poor’s 13-member index of managed-care companies up 3.9 percent.</blockquote&g t;
But Even the insurance industry is wondering about affordability.

Scott P. Serota, president and CEO of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, said while the group’s 39 affiliated companies nationwide support the goal of making coverage affordable, they are not in favor of taxes on the industry.

“We are greatly concerned that burdensome new taxes and fees aimed at insurers and other healthcare industry stakeholders would severely undermine the reforms that the chairman’s mark aims to achieve,” Serota said in a statement. “These unprecedented new taxes would make coverage much less affordable for individuals, their families, and employers.”

The proposed taxes also met with opposition from America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents nearly 1,3000 insurers nationwide.

“New taxes on health care coverage will have the opposite effect by making coverage less affordable for families and employers across the country,” AHIP president and CEO Karen Ignagni said.

Consumer Watchdog is far from sold on the Baucus insurance industry bail out.

The new health reform plan released today by U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) will charge middle-class families nearly 20% of their an nual income for health coverage, while letting insurance companies charge what they please for policies, said Consumer Watchdog. The consumer group, which pioneered the most successful insurance premium regulation law in the nation, today said only the extension of such regulation to health insurance can even begin to make insurance affordable—which it must be, if Americans will be forced to buy it.

The final word on the urgency of the Public Option belongs to the CIGNA whistle blower Wendell Potter:

Speaking before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee Tuesday, former health insurance industry executive-turned-whistle blower Wendell Potter warned that if Congress “fails to create a public insurance option to compete with private insurers, the bill it sends to the president might as well be called the Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act.”

Potter also struck back against one of the key arguments made against the public option: that it would have an unfair competitive advantage over private insurers.

’Contrary to the misinformation being disseminated by the health insurance industry and its allies, the public insurance option would not have a competitive advantage over private plans," Potter told the committee. "It would have to meet the same benefit requirements and comply with the same insurance market reforms as private plans. "