What’s Wrong With Shifting Healthcare Responsibility to Individuals

Shifting the costs and risks of healthcare onto individuals doesn’t solve the real problems with our healthcare: quality, cost, and availability.

• Shifting responsibility to individuals puts families’ health at risk. Requiring individuals to buy insurance when there’s no guarantee of affordability will mean that people end up buying policies they can afford, even if those policies don’t provide good coverage. The result will be the proliferation of cheap but inadequate policies with high deductibles, which will force consumers to delay needed care.
  
• Shifting the burden to individuals isn’t affordable and puts families’ finances at risk. Without a cap, a shift of responsibility is particularly destructive and troubling. The cost of family coverage has soared in recent years; many people, not just low-income people, can’t afford it. A family of four earning $60,000 would have to pay $12,000 for meaningful insurance, a nearly impossible burden to shoulder. Recent reports show that an increasing number of the uninsured are middle class individuals and families who just can’t afford insurance. If a family’s only option is a high-deductible plan, any chronic illness will expose them to huge losses every year and, ultimately, financial catastrophe.
  
• Requiring individuals to shoulder the burden for health care misdiagnoses the problem as individual irresponsibility. A requirement that individuals buy insurance is based on a false premise: that there are many people who “choose” to go uninsured. Study after study shows that people are uninsured simply because they can’t get it through their jobs or can’t afford it. Some proponents of shifting the risk to individuals point to high rates of uninsured young people and portray them as irresponsible.  But young people are poorer, are more likely to work in jobs without health care, and, when offered coverage, take it up at the same rate as older people.
• Californians want real reform, and they know that simply shifting responsibility isn’t the answer. According to a recent SEIU survey, only 23% favor a system that puts the burden solely on individuals and lets employers off the hook.