How much is too little when it comes to health care assistance? Can a state try to help small business owners and their employees but make things worse? At what point should citizens be grateful for any assistance and then try to meet the government in the middle, or slightly past that point, in an effort to help themselves? Is the bare minimum of insurance coverage better than nothing at all?
Those are just a few of the questions that ran through my mind when I read this article over at INC.com about Kentucky's new ICARE health care program. Apparently the state is now offering $40 a month (per employee) to employers with 2-25 employees in an attempt to help small business owners provide health care coverage to their workers.
Would you accept such help for your business? Would you ignore it as one more way "Big Brother" can butt in on your business operations? Or would you discount the offering, assuming it's not enough? One business owner sounds pretty negative, stating that this amount "barely scratches the surface" and that it's not enough to help employees get coverage worth having.
Hmmmm. I'm not looking out at the world from rose-colored glasses here, folks, but when I was uninsured, you can bet I'd have appreciated it if my employer had taken $40 from the state and matched it with $40 of their own money; perhaps then I'd have been able to buy some basic catastrophic coverage for their $80 plus $40-80 of my own. Is it a perfect solution? Probably not. Would it have been helpful, less intimidating, and more likely for me and my unisnured coworkers to be able to swing insurance somehow? Totally. Granted as a fairly young non-smoker, my quoted rates weren't that bad (yes, I could feasibly have gotten catastrophic coverage for the above $120-160 mark), but at the time, on a single mom's budget, the rates were still too high. $40 I could have come up with; $160 I couldn't, and didn't. Instead I was left working night and day, full time (and then some) for no overtime, no insurance, no benefits. As an employee of a small business, I'd have been grateful to have at least been offered something along these lines.
On top of that, I realize that some folks aren't just looking for themselves, they have families to provide insurance for. But my meandering thought here is that most states offer a children's insurance program as well, which would provide more than catastrophic care for the Littles, with adults being able to supplement things somehow for themselves. After all, if you don't take care of yourself, who's going to take care of your kids?
Maybe it's not the perfect solution, I say it again -- but at least it's yet another option worth considering. Let's see what they do with the numbers over the next year or so; it could be the start of a positive trend.
