Health coverage heading to flash point

The number of uninsured Virginians is climbing while medical coverage through the workplace is declining. Politicians are beginning to take notice. More than 1 million Virginians lack health insurance, studies find, and the percentage of Virginians getting health-care coverage through their employers dropped from a high of 70 percent in 1979 to 57 percent in the intervening 26 years. Virginians fare worse on work-basedinsurance than the Census Bureau's national average of 60.2 percent.

"We're clearly reaching the point when there's going to be something new in the medical area," said James Ceaser, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia. "All three [presidential] candidates have different proposals . . . something's going to happen," he said. In Virginia, the governor and some lawmakers tried to address the problem this year with a bill to create a VirginiaShare HealthInsurance Program. The legislation, which would have helped low-income working people by paying one-third of their health-insurance premiums, passed the Senate but died in a House of Delegates committee. It would have paid for insurance provided through small employers that are finding it more difficult to provide workers with medical coverage.

"Money is tight for any small business," said Lisa Stanfield, an executive vice president at Barber Martin Advertising in Richmond. "We've always wanted to have richer, better benefits than our competitors when we're hiring people," Stanfield said. But a small businesses, trying to provide good raises, cannot boost wages enough to offset health-insurance premium increases of 12 percent to 15 percent, she said. Her company gets forced into changing health-care carriers a lot, because insurance companies will underbid the existing carrier to win the business, Stanfield said. "Employees [who have to learn the new health plan] hate that," she said. In some cases, smaller employers are ending coverage.

The number of Virginians without medical insurance coverage increased since 2001 from 10 percent to more than 13 percent in 2006, or a million people. That occurred despite favorable economic conditions, the Commonwealth Institute, which released wage and benefits studies on Virginians before this year's General Assembly session, found. The Virginia figure is less than the 15.8 percent of uninsured Americans the Census Bureau determined in 2006, which equated to 47 million people. For the low-income self-employed, obtaining health insurance can be an insurmountable problem. Take Earl Hampton, a 64-year-old handyman who lives near Charlottesville.

The former naval architect for a defense contractor in Northern Virginia moved with his wife to the Afton area of Albemarle County to open a bed and breakfast in the late 1990s. With the move, the family income dropped from roughly $100,000 a year to $35,000. After the Sept. 11 attacks slammed the tourism business, they sold their B&B and moved to Greene County. His wife works as a business manager at a used-car lot and has no healthinsurance. He picks up maintenance work when he can. The Hamptons -- she has high blood pressure and he Type-2 diabetes -- have no medical insurance and lack the means to afford it. Hampton believes that more and more people will be doing in the future what he is doing now. "I take my echinacea and go to the free clinic."

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