Health coverage struggles continue in Virginia

By Sarah Arkin

Published: October 3, 2008

Virginians across the commonwealth were facing a heavy burden of finding available and affordable health insurance before the recent economic meltdown, and the prospect of alleviating that pain doesn’t look promising, health policy analysts said this week.

“A bad situation is clearly growing worse,” Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, said Tuesday. “Skyrocketing health care costs were a problem in Virginia before the current economic downturn and slow wage growth or job losses now only make matters worse.”

Families USA, a national nonprofit organization, recently released a study showing that while average health care premiums rose 82.5 percent, from $6,684 to $12,198, earnings only increased by an average of 20.2 percent, from $26,459 to $31,008.

At the same time that costs were rising, Pollack said, actual coverage was thinning and providing fewer benefits, higher deductibles, higher co-payments and higher insurance.

As they were releasing their state-specific studies, members of Families USA pointed out that these numbers were compiled before the current economic meltdown.

“Fewer Virginia workers are getting coverage at work,” likely because the cost of providing health care has become prohibitive for many employers, John McInerney, director of health policy at the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis, said on a conference call with Pollack earlier this week.

Traditionally, he said, Virginia employer-sponsored coverage has been very strong with about two-thirds of the population getting benefits from their jobs, well above the national average.

“In the last couple years, Virginia started to see some trouble signs,” McInerney said.

Currently, the percentage of premiums employees pay, 24 percent, is the highest in the country, he said.

For the second straight year, more than one million Virginians are uninsured, or about 14.8 percent of the population. In years past, Virginia had been well below the national average, McInerny said, but now the state’s number rivals the national average, which is just below 16 percent.

“Largely, that uninsured population has nowhere to go,” he said.

Reauthorization of the State Child Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) likely sits in the hands of the next administration, both Pollack and McInerney agreed.

Between eight and nine million children are uninsured and traditionally about two-thirds of them are eligible for SCHIP or Medicaid, health analysts said.

“If Congress does not provide the additional money, states are not going to be able to cover the costs where children are needy,” Pollack said.

The last time the measure came up for debate, Congress “by an overwhelming margin,” Pollack said, “passed a bill that would have reauthorized SCHIP provided more money to cover four million more children.”

President George W. Bush vetoed the legislation.

Contact Sarah Arkin at or (434) 791-7983.