Though much of the debate surrounding health-care reform has to do with federal spending and revenue -- and in particular the inability of Senate Democrats to agree on a revenue-creating mechanism -- Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and his staff have not taken a lead role, leaving much of the balance sheet heavy lifting to key health-care wonk and budget director Peter Orszag and the more analytical economic arguments to Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer. Watching Geithner applaud the president's health-care speech last Wednesday with the rest of the cabinet, I wondered when his team would join the push. And sure enough, over the weekend, the Treasury Department released a new report [PDF] on the availability of health care in conjunction with this week's presidential radio address on the subject. Here are the key takeaways:We can expect that about half of all Americans under 65 will lose their health coverage at some point over the next ten years. If you’re under the age of 21 today, chances are more than half that you’ll find yourself uninsured at some point in that time. And more than one-third of Americans will go without coverage for longer than one year.This research reflects the challenge of making arguments for health-care reform to the majority of people, who have some form of health insurance and don't necessarily understand the need for the president's effort. Nonetheless, more and more people who have had health insurance are going without for extended periods of time, especially young people. This isn't because young people don't want health insurance -- the idea of "young invincibles" is essentially a myth -- for instance, this survey [PDF] reveals that only 10 percent of the 31 percent of young workers who don't have health insurance are in that position by choice. And if nothing is done now, employer-provided health care will get increasingly expensive and more businesses will stop providing benefits, forcing people into an individual insurance market that is more expensive and deeply restricted. Even now, the chances that you will go without health insurance in a given year are steadily increasing, according to the report.Even though this research comes from the Treasury Department alongside a statement from Geithner, the work bears the fingerprints of Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy Alan Krueger. Krueger, a respected labor economist who runs the department's analysis division, has experience with research that covers a broad scope of the labor market. As the health-care debate continues in the fall, expect more efforts like this to bring health-care reform into perspective for today's "haves," since if nothing is done, they'll be tomorrow's "have-nots."
-- Tim Fernholz
