Americans Without Health Insurance Rose
The number
of people without health insurance rose by 1.4 million to 41.2 million
between 2000 and 2001, but at the same time the number of insured rose
by 1.2 million, to 241 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Meanwhile,
an estimated 14.6 percent of the population had no health insurance coverage
during all of 2001, up from 14.2 percent in 2000.
"The increase
of uninsured is probably due to an increase in population as well as an
increase in the unemployed," Robert Mills, author of Health Insurance Coverage:
2001, told United Press International. "The data came from surveying 78,000
households nationwide to see if they had health insurance during anytime
of 2001."
According to
Mills, 16 percent of males, including children, and 14 percent of females,
including children, of the 282 million people living in the United States
in 2001 did not have health insurance during 2001.
Other report
highlights include:
-- The number
and percentage of people covered by government health insurance programs
rose significantly between 2000 and 2001. This resulted largely from an
increase from 29.5 million to 31.6 million people covered by Medicaid.
-- Based on
three-year averages, the proportion of people without health insurance
ranged from around 7.2 percent in Rhode Island and Minnesota to around
23.2 percent in New Mexico and Texas.
-- Compared
with 2000, the proportion of people who had employment-based policies in
their own name fell for workers employed by firms with fewer than 25 employees,
but was unchanged for those employed by larger firms.
-- Young adults,
18 to 24 years old, remained the least likely of any age group to have
health insurance in 2001.
However, Stuart
Schear, of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, most of the people who do
not have health insurance are in their 30s, 40s and 50s, working in jobs
with modest wages in which their employer does not offer benefits, including
health insurance.
"As the cost
of health insurance has gone up, more companies are having employees share
a larger percentage of the health insurance cost and some workers may not
be able to afford the increase," Schear told UPI. "These workers earn too
much to qualify for public health programs and they don't earn enough to
pay for their own health insurance policy."
According to
the Department of Labor, only 24 percent of small businesses that employ
low-wage workers offer health benefits, compared to 88 percent of their
large business counterparts.
Former Presidents
Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter have pledged their support to a national initiative
to focus attention on the tens of millions of Americans who lack health
insurance.
Ford and Carter
will serve as honorary co-chairs of "Cover the Uninsured Week," which is
being organized by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a diverse group
of national organizations including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO,
the Business Roundtable and Service Employees International Union.
The weeklong
series of events will be held from March 10 to March 16 in communities
from coast to coast.
"Both former
presidents have a strong commitment to this issue and both would like to
see it be resolved," Schear said. "Not having health insurance is a leading
cause of personal bankruptcy and hospital emergency rooms and other health
facilities are often overwhelmed by the number of uninsured patients.
"In addition,
people without health insurance delay needed health care, live with illness
and die younger."
Mills said
that the report's survey did not ask the households if they were legal
or illegal immigrants or if those without health insurance were independent
contractors.
After the downsizing
of the 1990s, many companies laid off employees and rehired them as independent
contractors often at similar salaries but without benefits, according to
Paul Fronstin, of the Employee Benefits Research Institute, a non-partisan
research group in Washington.
"There is not
a lot of hard data on independent contractors, but we estimate it could
be about 5 (million) to 6 million workers who are uninsured who cannot
afford to pay for a single health insurance policy which is the most expensive
available, because it doesn't benefit from the group discounts companies
get," he told UPI.
"There is nothing
stopping companies in allowing its independent contractors from paying
for the group rate plan themselves to be insured, but they have already
decided not to allow some employees to receive benefits."
According to
Fronstin, there is no easy solution to having the uninsured covered because
anything will cost a lot of money.
"Many do not
want to expand government by allowing more to use Medicaid or allowing
workers to buy into Medicaid themselves and some companies say they cannot
afford the ever-increasing cost of health insurance," he said.
--
Copyright 2002 by United
Press International.
All rights reserved.
-- |
