News Sources: Health Insurance Cost Hikes

The increasing cost of health insurance is putting coverage out of reach for many small to midsize companies and their workers, even though the rise in premiums this year was the lowest increase in eight years. Since 2001, the cost of premiums has gone up 78 percent, far outpacing a 19 percent increase in wages and 17 percent jump in inflation, according to a survey released Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health care research group that annually tracks the cost of health insurance. Reporters looking for experts to interview on this topic can find them online at the collegenews.org database of news sources and subject matter experts from America's leading liberal arts colleges, including (click on names for contact information):

Merton Finkler - Professor of Economics, Lawrence University - Finkler is a specialist in the economics of health care. He has served as consultant to California's Kaiser Permanente Medical Group since 1987. He also runs Innovative Health Associates, a private consulting firm specializing in long-term care and managed care evaluation and strategy. He is a former Robert Wood Johnson Faculty Fellow in health care finance.

Alan H. Goodman - Professor of Biological Anthropology, Hampshire College - Goodman teaches and writes on the health and nutritional consequences of political-economic processes such as poverty, inequality and racism. He conducts several long-term studies into undernutrition in ancient cultures and correlating social factors. He is the author of Races and Wrongs: Why Good Science is Bad Science.

Martin A. Strosberg - Professor of Management, Union College - Strosberg, a leader in the evaluation of intensive care units, co-edited Rationing America's Medical Care: The Oregon Plan and Beyond and Rationing of Medical Care for the Critically Ill. He has researched the impact of New York State's 1987 Do-Not-Resuscitate Law.