Haley to Pass on Fed Health Dollars

According to The State, Governor Haley is signaling that she will join with some other Republican governors and opt-out of receiving millions of dollars in federal aid for health care. Specifically, the money is intended to help the state set up its own health exchange to comply with new national healthcare standards (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or ObamaCare, depending on your political leanings).

Two elements here caught my eye as a Midlands-area social problem. First, is the question of "what happens if the state just ignores the standards?" By my understanding of the law, states that "fail to progress" run the risk of having decisions made for them by federal regulators beginning in 2013. Unless Gov. Haley's calculation is an assumption the law will change prior to that time, it seems like the state is risking losing control over a major part of its budgetary independence.

Secondly, and more immediately troubling is the statistic that one-in-five SC residents under the age of 65 does not have health insurance. (Those over 65 are not typically at risk of being uninsured due to Medicare policies.) That number seemed high to me until I did some additional browsing through research about South Carolina's insurance coverage rates.

This report, created and distributes by Families USA (a non-profit foundation for health care consumers), describes the situation as even more dire. According to their statistics, one in three South Carolinians (under 65) was without insurance for all or part of 2007-2008. How they arrive at this number is an interesting process that we may speak about more in-class. That aside, the number of uninsured is especially concerning when you look at the racial/ethnic distribution of insurance gaps in the graph to the right.

Why such a difference? Well, automatically my hypothesis was that this is an intensification of resource loss by unemployment rates. However, at the very next point in the document, this pie-chart suggests that many families without health insurance are employed. In fact, the "unemployed" make up a very small (< 5%) part of the sample.

If anyone wants to look into the uninsured and health care access as a social problem for a long-term project, these numbers would probably form an interesting starting point of identifying the depth of the social issue facing Midlands-area families. Of course, you will want to use all of the stat-critical techniques we are learning in the class!