“According to the
U.S. Census Bureau data released Tuesday September 13th, 2011, the nation’s poverty rate rose to 15.1% (46.2 million) in 2010,
[2] up from 14.3% (approximately 43.6 million) in 2009 and to its highest level since 1993.”
“An estimated 45 million Americans, or
15.6 percent of the population, was uninsured in 2003, up from 15.2 percent in 2002, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent data.
“The number of uninsured has been growing the last several years,” said Catherine Hoffman, senior researcher and associate director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.
She blamed, among other things, the sluggish economy and growing cost of health care for the decrease in coverage. As the cost of health insurance has escalated, companies have opted to pass those higher premiums on to employees or to not provide coverage.
“We are in the midst of a weak economy,” said Paul Fronstin, director of health research, at the Employee Benefit Research Institute. “That means fewer jobs and fewer people with coverage.”
Job-based coverage – one of the major sources of health insurance in the United States – dropped from 61.5 percent in 2002 to 60.4 percent in 2003, according to the US Census Bureau.
“If you don’t get it through your employer, you don’t have many options for affordable coverage,” said Sara Collins, senior program officer at the Commonwealth Fund. “That means you have huge numbers of people who don’t have consistent, affordable access to the healthcare system.”
Even when employers provide insurance, she said, a growing number of people opt out of coverage because they can’t afford the premiums.
The cost of employer-sponsored covered increased by 13.9 percent between 2002 and 2003, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
The likelihood of coverage increases with income, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Only 41 percent of workers who earn less than $10 an hour had employer-provided insurance while 88 percent of those earning at least $15 an hour received it.
That’s a dangerous signal because a growing number of jobs are in the lower-paying service sector.
An estimated 80 percent of the uninsured are people like Jones who are employed or have a family member who is in the work force. They don’t have coverage because their employer doesn’t provide insurance or they can’t afford the employee premiums.
According to Kaiser, the average monthly premium is $282 for an individual and $756 for a family. That means a family would spend more than $9,000 a year for healthcare coverage.
The lack of coverage has a huge impact on the health and productivity of the uninsured as well as on local hospitals and governments, which try to meet their needs.
The Institute of Medicine has estimated that providing health insurance to those without coverage would save between $65 billion and $130 billion a year because **it would increase life expectancies **and worker productivity and would lower healthcare costs. The Institute, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, estimates that federal, state and local governments spend about $30 billion a year to pay hospitals and clinics for services they provide to the uninsured.”
money.cnn.com/2004/12/22/news/economy/poverty_healthcare/index.htm
Nations with national health services.
An argumentum ad hominem and a misrepresentation. I have no bitterness towards the U.S. and have many American friends.
