“Despite an upturn in the overall economy, the loss of health insurance coverage through employers has continued,” said Sharon Ward, Director of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center (PBPC), a non-partisan policy research project that analyzes state tax and budget matters. “Health insurance, which for a long time came as a basic benefit to a decent, middle-class job, is quickly disappearing for many Pennsylvanians.” From a press release found here.

Ward bases her comments on a new study on employer based health coverage that's out from the Economic Policy Institute.

Republicans like to paint themselves as pro-business and pro-market, but if you look at a lot of the policies some of them espouse around healthcare, it's really just pro-certain-really-rich-people. This is an important difference. Why? Click "Read More" to find out.

Take, for example, the so-called "Real Prescription for Pennsylvania." If you wade through the rhetoric on the site, you'll basically find that the real prescription comes down to two things, as far as I can tell.

A) Health savings accounts.

B) "Lifeline" plans, i.e., coverage that's so crappy it's supposed to be affordable.

For low-income folks, even a very poor plan is impossible. Blue Cross's Special Care program costs over $100 a month. For a lot of folks in Philadelphia, forget it. I'm salaried and it would really, really hurt for me to pay $100 a month for health insurance.

Then there's Health Savings Accounts: Well, in order to explode the myth that any normal person (nevermind poor folks) could ever save enough to actually pay for their own healthcare, I wanted to run the common costs for some procedures up here. Turns out that hospital prices are notoriously hard to get your hands on. I tried looking at some , but I'm not sure I'm reading it right. If I am, then dealing with an Abnormal Heartbeat costs about $50K at Thomas Jefferson and about $70K at Temple. I'm not even sure I'm looking at prices, but, assuming I am, the difference is probably explained by Temple patients getting charged the retail price of the Uninsured versus the wholesale price of the Insured.

It doesn't matter, though. The prices are so huge that most normal people would laugh at the thought of trying to pay it themselves.

It's like the idea of telling me you'll sell me The Bourse for $1 million or $10 million, based on the flip of a coin. It doesn't matter which side the coin lands on. Either one is impossible for me. There's no such thing as more or less impossible. Once something is impossible, it's just impossible. And it's impossible for the overwhelming majority of real people to pay for any kind of serious healthcare themselves.

But I think we all know that healthcare is crazy, crazy expensive. There is no saving for it. The whole notion is a joke. In fact, the only thing Health Savings Accounts are really good for is tax-sheltering really-rich people's money.

And that's why I say this whole notion of Consumer Driven Healthcare is just another example of the Politics of Pro-Certain-Really-Rich-People. It's a notion propped up and promulgated by spin doctors who are protecting the very, very rich people whose incomes are guaranteed based on out-of-control hospital prices and the wild west of healthcare markets. In fact, they argument puts the consumer in an even worse position than permitting his employer to negotiate a healthcare cost for him. He's got to do it alone, without a group, against a giant corporation that's going to make sure to charge him the absolute maximum it can.

Or, shut him out entirely. Her, too. In fact, according to the Maternity Care Coalition, one of the pre-existing conditions that can shut you out of coverage is "pregnancy."

As the EPI report shows, more and more employers are dropping coverage or scaling back coverage. That doesn't matter to the big monied interest that Bush and his cronies behind the "Real Prescription" are promoting, though. A new crop of educated young people enter the labor market every year, demanding benefits. They get snatched up by big corporations or small high-tech shops. That allows the big for-profit, Aetna's of the world, to cherry pick the low-risk, high return workers.

It's a lucrative market with margins plenty big enough to keep paying so called business-conservatives to protect it.

If you're really pro-business, though, you can see the real market effect the rising prices of this Wild West is having: employers are opting out of providing coverage and those that aren't are getting crushed by the cost of benefits.

Employers want covered workers, but they can't afford it. If legislators really want to be pro-business, they can enact the Prescription for Pennsylvania right now and give us all a comparative advantage over other states that haven't gotten their act together. With a subsidized insurance scheme and a stronger regulatory environment controlling the costs of insuring people, we will look a lot more attractive to businesses looking to get started or relocate.

Forget taxes: healthcare is the real cost to good businesses doing good work, and we have a chance to get ahead-of-the-curve and position ourselves competitively against our rival states.

If you haven't done it yet, lend your name to Pennsylvanians United for Affordable Healthcare and help us get this market under-control and working for our state again.