Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell Backs Health Insurance Plan

In a press release from the Pennsylvania Office of the Governor, Governor Ed Rendell began a statewide "Tour to Insure" focusing on lowering health care costs and expanding coverage to uninsured Pennsylvanians. It's all part of the Cover All Pennsylvanians (CAP) health insurance initiative which is the centerpiece for the Governor's "Prescription for Pennsylvania." The tour will hit nine stops over five days, and started with a town hall meeting in Pittsburgh.

The kick-off event was held in Allegheny County, which with over 100,000 uninsured adults has the tenth highest uninsurance rate in Pennsylvania. As Governor Rendell put it in the press release, "More than 100,000 adults in Allegheny County don't have insurance, which means they are more likely to forgo needed care, get sicker more often and for longer." He also focused on the fact that these are people, not numbers and that the situation hurts both businesses and workers, and so has to change. Currently there are over a quarter of a million uninsured adults in the top ten counties alone, with Tioga County having a whopping 35.6% rate of uninsured adults. Philadelphia has the most uninsured adults with 138,950 according to a 2004 Health Insurance Survey conducted for the Pennsylvania Insurance Department.

Health care costs have skyrocketed in Pennsylvania, rising by 75% in the last five years, while wages have only increased by 13% over the same period. These trends indicate that by 2011, a family of four could be spending one third of their income, about $20,000 on health insurance. Governor Rendell hopes to fight this trend by reducing avoidable and unnecessary costs in the health care system, which is estimated at $7.6 billion annually. Almost a billion dollars, $965 million, comes from readmissions to hospital and avoidable medical errors. Inadequate chronic disease management accounts for another 1.7 billion and the largest chunk, $3.5 billion comes from treating avoidable infections acquired while undergoing unrelated treatments in hospital.