Permit me to share my experience with health insurance. When I started work as a young man at the daily newspaper in Florence, I was provided individual health insurance coverage and had the opportunity when I married to add family coverage at my expense.

In 1971when I took a job with the State of Alabama I was also provided health coverage, albeit much better than at the newspaper and I could purchase family coverage at a very reasonable cost.

When I retired from state service in 1997 and purchased the weekly newspaper in Montgomery my state health insurance continued until I turned 65 and had to enroll in Medicare.

Needless to say I have been very fortunate with regard to health insurance and have also been very pleased with Medicare, having had only one issue with that government-run health insurance plan, and it was quickly resolved in my favor.

When I became the owner of a small business in 1997, I very quickly realized that health coverage in the private market is no cake walk. Wanting to provide individual coverage for my employees and give them the opportunity to purchase additional family coverage, I began giving various plans great scrutiny. I was shocked to learn that individual plans would cost about $175-per-month per employee, but I bit the bullet and signed up.

By 2006 that single-employee cost had risen to $300 per month and adding family coverage cost $777 for a mid-grade plan.

Those 2006 prices have now risen by 25 percent and today the single coverage cost for one employee for this type plan is $375 per month and the family coverage plan is $973 per month.

For a small business with 10 covered employees that 25 percent increase in three years amounts to an additional $7,500 annual expense.

While ordinary citizens and businesses small and large are struggling with the rising cost of health insurance, Congress, along with federal and state government workers, are mostly provided generous health coverage programs, costing the taxpayers billions, if not trillions of dollars.

Yet many of our representatives are using a budget-deficit argument against giving the average American taxpayer even an option for mediocre health coverage that would be paid for with other cost cuts over the next 10 years. They falsely cry “deficits” even though many of them voted a few years back to enact a Medicare prescription drug benefit at a cost of $1 trillion over the next decade without raising or saving a dime to pay for it.

Also, recall that a few years back Congress adopted tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans that will cost nearly $2 trillion over 10 years, again without making provisions to offset the costs. Now some in Congress are complaining that $1 trillion for health care reform, which will be totally off-set with savings over the next 10 years, is too much to spend on the most important problem for many middle and low income families.

The highly respected American Association for Retired People says this about the current health reform debate:

“Overhauling the nation’s ailing health care system is too important to be trivialized by the sort of rhetoric we’ve been hearing lately. The country should be in the midst of a transformative national conversation, but that’s not happening.

“Instead, we’ve seen a free-for-all of careless exaggeration, retooled social issues, partisan posturing and the revival of a time-worn ‘socialized medicine’ shibboleth that didn’t work 50 years ago and is out of date today. Unfortunately, these tactics have been a staple of the health care debate for two decades.

“Lawmakers should worry less about delay and concentrate on getting the details right. In the meantime, take a deep breath, folks. Give this terribly important issue the thoughtful and serious attention it deserves.”

Getting the details right means controlling the runaway cost of health insurance and if that doesn’t happen we will see more and more businesses reducing or eliminating the offer of company-paid insurance to employees, which will create more and more hardships for working Americans.

Bob Martin is editor and publisher of The Montgomery Independent.

Email him at: bob@montgomeryindependent.com.