Health care crunch: One family's story
Whenever the phone rings, Connie Koebke Barsic dreads answering it. Chances are it's another darn bill collector hounding the Madison mom another time for yet another medical bill she can't afford to pay.
Like many other middle class families in Wisconsin, the Koebke Barsics are losing the struggle to keep up with whopping health care costs. A recent report released by Families USA, a consumer advocacy group, found that between 2000 and 2007 health insurance premiums for Wisconsin employers and employees increased nearly five times faster than earnings did. The average annual premium for a family plan increased 73.9 percent to $12,369, while median income in the state inched up a sluggish 15.5 percent, to $28,202.
Connie and her husband, Mike, are examples of the toll that this growing gap between stagnant wages and soaring insurance costs takes on local families. In 2007, they had not yet paid off medical bills for their brood of six from the two years before. But then Connie, 49, broke her ankle and Mike, 46, had a stroke. Today they are thousands of dollars in debt, despite dipping into their retirement fund three times in a useless attempt to catch up. The next solution Connie thought of, she said, was to take out a second line of equity on their home. But she just discovered that won't work. In a Catch-22, their credit is bad because of the overdue medical bills.
"This is so humiliating," Connie said. "We are good, decent, hard working people. We're your average American family. This shouldn't be happening to us."
This script is being played out all across the country. Total compensation as a share of the national economy has remained stuck between 56 percent and 59 percent for the past 40 years, according to research conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Yet the bite that health benefits take out of that total compensation jumped from 1.4 percent in the 1960s, when Connie and Mike were kids, to more than 7.2 percent today. And Connie and Mike are now baby boom parents squeezed between the need to provide for their kids and their own old age.
Every year they scrimp more. Their last family vacation was in 2000. The couple drives used cars. Their kids give up shopping trips to the malls with friends to hunt for deals at used clothing stores instead. Needed repairs to their modest ranch home, which they purchased 14 years ago, are postponed. They don't ski or snowmobile or buy new furniture or do anything else "extravagant," Connie said.
"We don't have any extra," she said.
Still, it doesn't help. If anything, the situation is getting bleaker, given the crumbling economy. Both Connie and Mike work full-time. Connie is a social worker and sells skin care products on the side. Mike sells cars. Recently, Connie got a small monthly raise, but Mike's income, dependent on commissions in a faltering industry, took a nose dive.
If this weren't trouble enough, the family now faces a tough decision. The couple's employers, shaken by the increase in insurance costs, have been shopping around for cheaper health care plans. The upshot is that now the Koebke Barsic family will need to switch to a stingier and more restrictive plan.
That means giving up the beloved family doctor who has cared for them through the last 15 years of births, strokes, accidents and winter sniffles. One Sunday afternoon, their doctor even took the time to pick some flowers from her garden and visit their 11-year-old son in the hospital, where he was recovering from an accident.
"Basically we have to choose between good and continuous care from a doctor who knows us well, and affordability," Connie said.
Three of the kids are now grown up, and the family's medical plan now only covers four -- yet even so, the family's insurance bills have grown steadily.
"The premiums are going up and what's covered is going down," Connie sighed.
The piles of paperwork have grown, too. To get through it all, dealing with the inevitable tussles of appealing rejected claims, Connie said, "I would need to take the day off and spread everything all over the table -- a day off I can't afford."
Local advocates for health care reform say the Koebke Barsic story is all too familiar.
"A huge health insurance cost run up is having a devastating impact on families and businesses in our state," said Robert Kraig, program director for Citizen Action of Wisconsin, a grassroots organization pushing for greater regulation of what it calls the "predatory practices" of the insurance industry.
Without a major overhaul of the health care system, Kraig warned, Wisconsin's ranks of the uninsured will rise. And middle class families like the Koebke Barsics will fall even more behind.
Submitted photo
Connie and Mike Koebke Barsic, with children Paul and Emily.
