A Message from the Founder of The BAER Project

As costs go up, fewer individuals and families have health insurance and fewer businesses can afford to provide coverage for their employees, which means the number of uninsured Americans will continue to increase until solutions reduce this growth. Many of those without health insurance are people employed by companies that can no longer afford to offer employer-sponsored health care.

With employer-sponsored health insurance providing most American residents with their healthcare coverage a new report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), Shifting Ground: Changes in Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance, shows an increasing number of employees in America are declining their employers’ offer of health insurance due to the costs being passed from the employers’ to employees. The report provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of how this traditional job benefit is changing.

In the higher income groups those hit hardest are those who run their own businesses, early retirees and consultants, who must buy coverage in the individual market where policies are more expensive – and harder to get – than policies offered to employer groups. Managing a mortgage, college tuitions and the cost of life has led more families to risk losing health coverage in order to pay other expenses.

Since 2000 health insurance premiums have gone up 78% and wages only 20%. The national increase in individual premiums from 1998 to 2003 was $1,027, a 42% increase after being adjusted for inflation. In 2006 alone the rate of insurance premiums has increased 7.7% twice the rate of inflation.

Fortunately there are many agencies, governmental and private that are committed to reversing this trend.

The BAER Project is one.

Hello my name is David Claggett, founder of The BAER Project, Inc.

When developing this program our initial focus was on helping low-income families, specifically those with children who were not receiving adequate or needed health care.

Our mission was to find solutions to that problem.

It was overwhelming to find such a large percentage of working and middle-income families who were also uninsured and at risk of being financially devastated by unexpected emergency medical expenses.

As a non-profit corporation we developed a program that offers a solution. Fortunately our nonprofit status allows us to turn the revenue we are able to generate into premium payments to help subsidize health insurance for our subscribers.

This program offers a unique opportunity for those who qualify to provide health care coverage for their families without the stress of wondering how they will pay for it.

If you are willing and able to set aside time to take these simple surveys you can earn the assistance to subsidize your health insurance payments.