Health Care’s Raw Deal for Middle-Class Families
Health care reform advocates often point out that the costs of reform should be weighed against the costs of doing nothing. Unfortunately, that’s very hard to do, since our health care and tax arrangements mask those costs so well. I suspect that if middle-class Americans had a better grasp of what health care really costs them, and how those costs are shaping their economic futures, the public demand to control costs could spark political changes akin to the tax revolt of the 1970s.
These are my thoughts, at least, reading a new piece from Eugene Steuerle, a tax economist at the Urban Institute with a knack for collecting data that can help us see the world in fresh ways. From the data Steuerle presents, we can calculate that within just five or six years, the average middle-class family will have to devote nearly one-third of its income to health care costs. That’s right: one-third. According to the CBO, the average family will earn $54,000 a year in 2016, when a moderate-priced family policy will cost $14,700. Employers will pay much of that insurance bill for most middle-class families; but that’s just a mask, since those employer payments come out of people’s wages, not a company’s profits. In real effect, a middle class family’s earnings in 2016 will come to $68,700 ($54,000 + $14,700), of which $14,700 or 21.4 percent will go for health insurance. And that won’t be their only health-related costs. Their co-payments and other uninsured expenses, on average, will come to another $5,100. They’ll also be paying taxes to help cover other people’s health care — 2.9 percent of their cash wages for Medicare ($1,566), plus perhaps $750 more in federal and state income taxes for Medicaid and for Medicare costs not covered by the 2.9 percent payroll tax. Add up all of that, and it comes to $22,116, or 32.2 percent of the middle-class family’s adjusted income of $68,700.
While Steuerle is concerned — rightly so — about provisions in health care reform that will treat people with the same incomes differently, depending on the rules the legislation applies to employers, I’m more incensed about the current, raw deal for middle-class Americans. Why should an average family expect to pay one-third of its income in 2016 on a health care system which, in that same year, should claim 16 percent of our GDP? The biggest part of this puzzle lies in the fact that most of the costs are roughly the same for most people, regardless of their income. The worker earning $68,700, a manager who makes $100,000, and the company’s CEO who earns $1 million all will pay the same $14,700 for their families’ health coverage. Their out-of-pocket expenses do rise with income but not by very much; and while the manager and CEO pay more Medicare taxes than our average worker, they all pay at the same 2.9 percent rate. There also are other factors which reduce the burden on other groups — and so tacitly increase it for those middle-class families. For example, people on Medicare and Medicaid bear much lower insurance costs, although they also pay relatively more for their out-of-pocket expenses; and families without children pay relatively less for both insurance and out-of-pocket expenses.
Whatever the causes, the data show clearly that health care costs have become a core economic issue for middle-class Americans. Unless we can contain them, and over time even reduce them, realistic prospects of upward mobility for most middle-class families will simply slip away. Health care, in short, has to be an essential part of a new economic strategy.
The last political upheaval over the economic prospects of the middle class began with Proposition 13 in California and went on to fuel a conservative realignment that held sway for a quarter century. The next one may well have begun already with these unsustainable health care costs. President Obama, whose talent for reading the American mood rivals Ronald Reagan’s, tried to respond quickly with several reasonable ideas for cost containment. His proposals went nowhere when healthcare providers and insurers countered, in effect, by threatening to withhold people’s care. The next time, this issue will be recast in terms that everyone understands — people’s real incomes — and the results could be very different.