Someone once said that Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right that everything is economics. Nothing illustrates this maxim more than the various attempts by states to get around ERISA preemption – such as discussed here and here – and mandate health insurance coverage in one manner or another. These attempts by states – which are simply doomed to eventual court declarations that they are preempted- seek to force employers to expand health care availability and, in some cases such as Massachusetts, to get those who fall outside of the employer provided health insurance system to buy their own coverage. The problem is that these legislative attempts don’t affect the real problem, which is that the costs of providing health insurance has escalated to the point where employers face huge financial disincentives to expand their offerings of health insurance and uncovered employees cannot afford their own policies. Here it is in stark black and white (literally, since it comes from the NY Times, rather than from the USA Today, where I guess it would be in stark color): “[t]he cost of employer-sponsored health insurance premiums has increased 6.1 percent this year, well ahead of wage trends and consumer price inflation, but below the 7.7 percent increase in 2006, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported today.” Beyond that, the article points out that “health costs had increased 78 percent since 2001, more than four times as fast as prices and wages.”

The ever increasing impact on the bottom line of providing health insurance is why the employer provided system isn’t expanding to cover more people, and why the uninsured cannot insure themselves. Although the Massachusetts reform act takes some steps towards altering that dynamic, at least with regards to those not covered by employer provided plans and who must instead insure themselves, the simple fact is the various state reform acts aren’t really directed at fixing this fundamental base line problem (and they probably can’t attack this problem effectively on a state by state basis, just further driving home a point I have made previously, that the availability of health insurance coverage probably should not be addressed on a state by state basis, should be addressed on a national basis, and that ERISA preemption of these types of state acts is a good thing as a result). Unless and until the base problem of the economic numbers is tackled, these reform acts aren’t targeting the actual disease, just some of the symptoms of it.