Lawmakers debating health care on Capitol Hill have spent months worrying about the potential cost. But mostly it’s been the total cost of the bill, not how much individual families who could soon be required to buy insurance for the first time might have to pay.
That could be a costly miscalculation, says health economist Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Let’s put it this way: It is 10 times as important as the public option and has received one one-hundredth of the coverage,” he says.
That’s because, in the end, whether or not people can afford health insurance may have a bigger impact on the bill’s political popularity than whether the final price tag exceeds a trillion dollars. Joan Alker is co-director of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. Her group commissioned a survey of what voters want most in a health care overhaul bill and found, “by a 2 to 1 margin, the priority was to make coverage more affordable for families, rather than making sure health reform doesn’t cost the country too much money.”