About 75 percent of Americans who work part-time can’t get health insurance through their jobs. Missouri lawmakers are part of the fortunate 25 percent. The part-time lawmakers, whose five-month legislative session ended Friday, not only can buy coverage for themselves — with state taxpayers picking up roughly 72 percent of the cost — they can get it for their families. That’s even more unusual.
Perhaps that explains some of their misconceptions about health care.

Lawmakers had the chance to cover about 35,000 working parents at no cost to state taxpayers. Hospitals volunteered to provide $52.5 million to the state from federal money they already receive to care for the uninsured. Their payments would have triggered $93 million in federal matching payments.

But Republican legislators balked at helping poor working parents. They killed the deal.

Now that the legislative session has ended, it’s worth separating the wheat of health insurance reality from the chaff of political ideology.

Lawmakers seem to think that health insurance is easy to obtain and affordable. It is for them. It’s not for the rest of us.

Legislators, of course, have government jobs. That’s a good thing when it comes to getting health coverage. About 97 percent of Americans who work for state and local governments are offered health insurance.

But only 58 percent of those who work in service industries and just 40 percent of people who work in retail get health benefits.

In other words, plenty of Missourians work full-time hours but can’t get health insurance at work and can’t afford to buy it on their own.

Break out the low-income group who are most likely to be uninsured — those earning less than about twice the federal poverty level, or about $36,620, for a family of three — and the trends are discouraging. Between 2000 and 2007, the number of low-income workers offered health insurance at work fell from 65 percent to just 58 percent. The number that actually could afford to buy the coverage that was offered fell from 53 percent to 41 percent.

House Budget Committee Chairman Allen Icet, R-Wildwood, balked at the idea of covering “able-bodied adults.”  Sen. Tom Dempsey, R-St. Charles, who wrote a Republican alternative health plan, referred to “what I guess you would call the working poor.”

“Able-bodied working poor” is a good summary of who makes up the uninsured. What’s wrong is that able-bodied people who are willing to work still can’t get health insurance, and it’s through no fault of their own.

In Missouri, a single mother struggling to raise two children on $3,800 a year — a little over 20 percent of the poverty level — would be considered too wealthy for Medicaid. The Legislature was asked to raise that to about half the poverty level, or about $9,000 a year for a mother with two children.

Too expensive, said the GOP lawmakers.

They, and the rest of the uninsured, will have to wait until they’re sick enough to go to hospital emergency rooms. The unreimbursed costs of their care will be passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher insurance rates. That’s why Mr. Nixon’s plan made sense: Cover 35,000 of them up front and you reduce costs for everyone.

Mr. Nixon should call the lawmakers back into session. Show them big charts with easy-to-understand numbers. Make it clear that by failing to address the problem of the uninsured in Missouri, lawmakers have made a miserable situation even worse.