BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

I have a friend my age (56) with impeccable credentials: She has a Master's Degree; 18 years experience as a successful college administrator; glowing recommendations; she shows up for work every day and is hardly ever sick; she's a team player and works selflessly for whomever she's employed by.

She also has a pre-existing medical condition (as does virtually everyone by the time they reach 50).

Therefore, she is almost completely unemployable by American companies.

Well, not quite. Store clerk jobs, entry level temp jobs, manual data entry jobs, real estate and consulting jobs are all available to her -- as long as they don't offer benefits.

In this experience my friend is like virtually every other 50+ year old. Unless we make a company a couple hundred thousand a year, increased medical premiums make us too expensive to hire.

When a job offers benefits -- like, oh, say, every single job that her many years of successful service qualify her for -- by the end of the training period, employers find that she's just "not quite right for the job," that they were looking for a different kind of experience, and gosh darn it if every person who replaces her isn't about 25 years old with virtually no experience.

However, these 25-year-olds hold one credential my friend will never hold again. They have clean medical records and, at their age, they don't make insurance companies nervous and they don't increase a company's group rates.

I had a similar experience. After 4½ years with a national telecommunications company and the year after I was one of the regional sales leaders, I had a third two-day circulatory problem that landed me in the hospital. When I returned, instead of concern or some assistance in helping me get back on my feet, suddenly everything I'd been taught to do by my company was wrong, and I was suddenly being written up again and again for providing the same exceptional customer service I'd received awards for the previous year -- and, within five months, I was out of a job.

My experience was not rare. A colleague in another store, who'd been recognized multiple times for technical competence, outstanding customer care, and high sales, was out within six months when it became apparent that he was going to need hip replacement surgery.

Shortly thereafter, I got a job at an unionized insurance company with 2,300 employees. They were a good company and took good care of their salespeople, but they also had five top producers in their 50s who had cancer and, as a result, they could no longer offer the rest of us insurance because those five people with cancer produced an average monthly insurance premium of $800 a month for every one of the company's employees.

Fortunately, I now work for myself and, after a couple years of struggle, I'm doing just fine, but I did have an unholy battle to find health insurance and I'm lucky to have found some insurance in a public plan that I can afford. But many of my friends are not so lucky, and most are just trying to hang on until Medicare kicks in when they are 65. Most of us will probably make it; some won't because for too long they will have avoided the cost (and the premium increase) that would have come if they had sought prompt medical attention.

So here's the dilemma: There are increasing numbers of 50 and older workers who cannot find good paying jobs commensurate with their successes and credentials because of the cost of providing them with health care. So what do they do instead?

With No Insurance, Unemployed Workers Can:

1. Retire early. If there's some small pension out there, such as one from the government or the military, it's easier to retire than to keep fighting for a job when your health insurance costs make employers unable to hire you.

2. Go bankrupt. If you have serious medical conditions, the only way to get Medicaid is to go bankrupt. Then the government will take care of you. This means you have to blow through your pension that you've worked all your life to save, and that means that you'll be living on the government dole for the rest of your life.

3. Get a job at a convenience store. As long as they don't have to pay benefits, they can pay you $7.50 per hour and know that you'll probably show up for work every day, probably won't miss work because you took Ecstasy and danced all night, and won't mess up the reconciliation of the store receipts at the end of the day.

4. Be a consultant, independent contractor, or self-employed realtor. You can hire out and your employer won't have to pay benefits. This can sometimes offer you good money and, if they hire you as a consultant, your employer gets all your expertise and none of your health insurance costs. You, on the other hand, are still stuck with soaring (or unavailable) health insurance, with the hope that you won't keel over and blow it for your family and retirement and with hope is that you can scrape through until 65 when Medicare kicks in.

5. Live on the street. According to a 2006 The New York Times article [1] an ever increasing percentage of the homeless in New York are between 55 and 65.

6. Get married to get access to someone else's insurance coverage.

Problems Without a Public Option:

1. You'll probably have to use up your pension. You know, the one you've worked all these years to save that was supposed to help you retire in comfort. Your problem, of course, was just that you didn't know you were starting a savings plan so that it could be harvested at 55 by some pharmaceutical company or some hospital. Silly you! You believed that crap about saving for a comfortable retirement.

2. You'll quit contributing to Social Security at any significant rate and will put additional strain on a system you should have been contributing to at your highest pre-retirement levels.

3. American companies won't be able to hire you -- even though they desperately need experienced, dedicated employees -- because the company's accountants and shareholders won't let them.

4. Without proper and affordable medical care, your health may decline, but then again, there's always bankruptcy and Medicaid.

5. You'll probably have to seek early government assistance or accept whatever minimal level of Social Security they'll offer. After all, both still pay better than the greeter's job at Wal-Mart.

On the other hand, if, pray God, we get a public option whose premium doesn't discriminate based on age or pre-existing conditions, the entire job situation for older workers will change beyond belief virtually overnight.

With a Public Option:

1. Employers will be able to hire you (or not) based on your experience and qualifications. What a concept! Maybe someone with a degree and a 30-year track record of job success might actually make a good new hire? Get outta' here....

2. Fewer older employees will lose their high-paying positions, because the cost of their health care will no longer overshadow their continuing ability to do their job well.

3. More workers will work extra years before retiring. Why quit early if you're making good money and you're contributing to the success of your company?

4. With more workers working extra years, some of the increasing pressure on Social Security will be relieved.

5. Unions will be able to negotiate for better pay and better safety. They won't have to fight for expensive health care benefits that certainly offer less benefit for younger workers -- except, of course, when they really, really, really need them.

6. American corporations can be come more competitive as the crushing health care burden that sunk General Motors are no longer eating as heavily into their profits.

7. Businesses will make fewer mistakes driven by youthful exuberance and inexperience. It's great that younger workers have the drive and energy to push goals forward, but it makes sense to have top management decisions made not just by youthful visionaries, but also by those who've seen the consequences of rash decisions made by too much testosterone and Red Bull. (The Internet boom comes to mind.)

8. Uninsured health costs paid by the government would go down.

9. Hospitals could stay in business because they would reduce unpaid care provided to those without health insurance.

10. The general health of the 55-65 demographic ought to improve a bit as needed medical care can be accessed as needed, rather than only when situation become desperate.

11. State funded workman's compensation costs would go down, thereby making American employers more competitive.

12. More money will be available for banks to loan, because American savings rates will go up, when IRAs are no longer bled dry by medical bills.

13. Bankruptcies and foreclosures will go down. 50% of all bankruptcies are medically related [2] and 25% of those facing foreclosure say their inability to pay is related to medical problems.

14. When we die, we'd get to quit having to answer all those embarrassing questions from St. Peter about why the richest country on Earth wasn't willing to provide basic health care to many of its citizens. ("And the King shall answer and say to them, Truly I say to you, Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my brothers, you have done it to me." Matthew 25:40.)

So our choices are stark:

1. We can continue as we are, with our top priority clearly demonstrated as the need to offer an earnings bonus to insurance and health companies at terrible personal, physical, and financial cost to a generation of older, injured, and sick workers. Or,

2. We can create a public option that covers all uninsured workers, thereby reducing health care costs by $150 billion over 10 years (according the Congressional Budget Office). We'll also increase American competitiveness, increase America's healthiness, dramatically reduce its medical costs, bolster Social Security, and we'll end the embarrassment of being the only first-world country that lets millions and millions of its citizens suffer without health care.

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

Steve Corrick is a Montana realtor, verified voting and climate change activist and 56 year old who, like most members of his generation, desperately needs better insurance options.

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