Uninsured Liability
Costs rose, and a couple of years later Unicut stopped paying for family coverage, though it still offered employees the option of paying the premiums themselves. But costs kept rising. Today, Kolb says, Unicut pays around $200 per employee every month for health insurance. Just one of the company’s 27 employees pays for spouse or family coverage, and Kolb says she knows some spouses and families are simply going without.
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These employees may be in for some relief if Pritchard and others succeed in getting the legislature to approve a program that would provide health insurance to some 200,000 uninsured workers in the state. Dubbed FamilyCare, the legislation would expand the state’s KidCare program to include parents of covered children–a change the federal government, which provides 65 percent of the funding for the program, began allowing last summer. Workers whose employers offered family coverage would get a subsidy to make their premiums affordable, and workers whose employers didn’t would be covered by the state-administered program. Its benefits would apply to people who make between $8,000 and $31,500 (for a family of four), or up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level.
But last year Illinois lost $69 million because it still hadn’t enrolled enough children to meet the federal goal, though Congress later gave the state a second chance to spend $44.5 million of that money. The lost millions didn’t stay in Washington; they were sent to states that had done a better job of enrolling kids, such as New York, Indiana, and Wisconsin.
FamilyCare supporters have encountered almost no ideological opposition to the notion of the state paying the health care costs of lower-income working people. Even the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Illinois have endorsed the bill; insurance companies stand to benefit from its passage because more employees would participate in employer plans and because costs would be lower if the pool of the insured became healthier.
