Jerseyans feel bite of health care costs
MARY JO LAYTON Group finds 1.5M spend over 10% of income Nearly 1.5 million New Jerseyans spend more than 10 percent of their pre-tax incomes on health care -- and 80 percent of them are insured, an advocacy group said yesterday. Higher premiums, rising co-payments and deductibles as well as pricier treatment over the last nine years have led to a 43 percent increase in the number of people who have hit that spending bracket, according to Families USA, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. Of those numbers, 364,000 New Jersey residents are in families that will spend more than 25 percent of their incomes, before taxes, on health care, the report concluded. "More and more families with insurance are affected by rising health care costs, and for many, the burden of these costs is becoming too great to bear," said Ron Pol lack, executive director of Families USA. Kenneth P. Colen, a 43-year-old cancer survivor, is one of the millions who spends more than 10 percent of his pre-tax income on health care -- even with good insurance. Diagnosed with a rare cancer in July 2007, Colen was facing an $80,000 bill for treatment -- on top of the $12,000 he paid for surgery. For years, he had paid $1,600 in monthly premiums for coverage that included out-of-network care, which he received at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Under his policy, Colen said he was responsible for costs up to $10,000. Yet his insurer insisted he was responsible for $80,000 worth of care for treatment that exceeded what his insurer considered "usual and customary" charges. "It put such a drain and stress on us after battling cancer, radia tion and chemotherapy," said Colen, of Montclair. "I paid a premium to get good coverage and I was told I wouldn't be covered at the end of the day be cause of some fine print." In fighting one bill for chemotherapy, Colen learned his insurer only covered a dose of medication that was smaller than he was given. "As if I'm supposed to stand there with a clipboard and count up doses before they infuse me with this poison that will save my life?" he said. With the help of an attorney friend and the state Department of Banking and Insurance, Colen appealed and his bill was reduced to about $40,000, he said. The hospital has also offered a discount on his final bill, reducing it to about $31,000, he said. Families USA's findings underscore the importance of delivering major health care reform by year's end, as urged by President Obama, said U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone (D- 6th Dist.), chairman of the energy and commerce subcommittee on health. "This is a crisis for the underin sured as well as for those without insurance coverage," Pallone said at the teleconference announcing the numbers. In addition to proposed reforms in Congress, the administration is seeking to lower the growth of national health spending by 1.5 percent a year over 10 years -- an esti mated savings of $2 trillion or more. |
