By NYCeve (Eve Gittelson)

There’s been discussion lately about yet another mechanism—a trigger—as a way to make healthcare reform more palatable to the insurance industry. Such a scheme is ludicrous. The private insurance industry has had fifty years to rein in its egregious and predatory business practices. Have they responded? Of course not.

This year, small businesses across America are facing some of the most onerous renewals of the last decade. Kind of like the insurance industry is getting in its last licks before an ax of some sort falls on them. Small business owners are responding to unaffordable rate hikes by downgrading employee benefits to dangerous high deductible policies, also known as junk insurance.

Ask any small business owner how bad life has become.

Just recently, I received notification of yet another health insurance premium increase of 19 percent. Colorado small businesses like mine cannot sustain such sizeable increases much longer. The time for health care reform is now.

. . .Employers are now increasingly purchasing group plans with high deductibles or few benefits; insuring only their employee and ending dependent coverage for kids and spouses; or dropping coverage altogether. This is a collectively short-sighted approach, because we as a state are not only protecting our current workforce, but are failing to invest in the health and development of our future workforce, leaders and clients.

The insurance premium death spiral is unsustainable even in Arizona, John McCain’s back yard.

Your benefits may be secure today. But what happens if you lose your job? Try shopping for health insurance on your own and discover the expense. If you have just about any type of serious medical condition, insurers will deny coverage or issue a policy that doesn’t pay for the medical conditions you face.

If you come down with cancer or a brain tumor, insurers may scrutinize your medical history. If they find that you misrepresented or forgot details of your medical history, they may retroactively cancel your policy. It’s called rescission.

So your coverage is great, your employment is secure and you’re in perfect health? You’re still going to pay to compensate for the system’s weaknesses.

Studies indicate that companies and employees who have health coverage get charged more to help absorb providers’ costs related to the growing ranks of the poor, elderly and uninsured.

Any way you might concoct a trigger, it would be a mortal blow for millions of small businesses across the United States. The small business premium increase death spiral is unsustainable, this yearly rite of passage has morphed into a death watch for beleaguered and desperate small businesspeople.

Ask any small business owner, if they can tough out another six or eight years of frightening premium rate hikes and woefully inadequate coverage? How much more destruction do we need to experience before the government steps in?

Think about it. What would the trigger be for the public health insurance option? Skyrocketing prices? Already there. No choice or competition? Already there. Denying care? Already there. As has been proven time and time again, we have a health care crisis now. Trigger conditions have long since been met.

So, proponents of a trigger are in effect saying, “Wait! The health care crisis needs to get worse. The insurance industry should be more concentrated and premiums should be higher before we give America relief.”

And to that, any reasonable person would shake their head. Because we know the health care crisis isn’t some far-off hypothetical, it’s real and it’s happening now. Every 30 seconds, another person goes into bankruptcy because of health care costs. If that’s not the definition of a crisis that needs to be resolved now, then I don’t know what is.

The trigger idea might have been a good one ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. But now it’s too late. Trigger conditions have been met. We have a health care crisis, and those who say we should let it get worse without implementing a public health insurance option to give you and me choice and affordability deserve the ridicule they get.

It’s so old and tired to make the point again, but I must.

The US has by far the most expensive and least effective health care system in the industrialized world. We spend double per person what Japan spends. Drugs in the US cost 40-50% more than in other counties, and Americans cross the Northern and Southern borders to secure by any means available less expensive alternatives. Employers are scaling back or dropping employee health benefits entirely.

Our life expectancy is near the bottom. We are the only industrialized nation without some kind of universal coverage. The system is rigged to allow the insurance industry to profit from our misfortune. And of course they have huge lobbies to shape the laws, distort the news and frighten the American people. In short Americans are under siege.

It can’t possibly get any worse than it is now. Well, I guess it could. We could face the prospect of “reform” without a public option, or with a public option hijacked by a trigger.

It’s also time to wake up and rise up America.