Friday, April 28, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- The problem of getting and then keeping affordable health insurance affected substantially more middle-income workers in 2005 as more went without coverage, according to a latest report.
Among working adults with annual incomes of $20,000 to $40,000, 42% were uninsured for at least part of the past year, up from 26% who were at least temporarily without coverage in 2000, according to a survey of 4,355 people from The Commonwealth Fund, a research group in New York.
Low-income Americans typically face the biggest challenge with health insurance, and also the trend of more moderate-income people losing it is "worrisome," said Sara Collins, senior program officer for the Commonwealth Fund.
"Forty-thousand dollars a year is by no means a low-wage job," she said.
The numbers also show that in the U.S. population as a whole there were 33 million who were uninsured at the time of the survey, and 84% of those had been uninsured for a year or longer. Among the 15 million who had insurance at the time of the poll but had spent some time without coverage in the past year, about one-fourth had at some point been uninsured for a year or longer, Collins said.
Several factors in the last few years have combined to make it tougher for moderate-income families to hold onto their health plans. Wage growth has been stagnant and the percentage of employers -- especially small firms -- offering coverage had been falling, said Gary Claxton, vice president of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington.
"Health-insurance costs have been going up so much faster than income, it's not surprising that difficulty in getting access to health benefits and keeping them would be going up the income scale," he said.
Of the estimated 48 million uninsured adults age 19 to 64 in the country, 67% were in families where at least one person was working full time, according to the report.
Increased cost-sharing where workers are on the hook for more out-of-pocket spending on deductibles, copays and premiums has put health care out of reach for more people, Collins said. And those on their own without job-based plans often find the individual market unaffordable or inaccessible, especially if they have preexisting conditions, she said.
"Premiums might be quite high or they might not be covered at all," she said.
"Because of the underwriting issue, it makes that market problematic for people looking for alternatives."
About 6% of those surveyed had individual insurance.
posted by kanth
@ 12:59 AM
permanent link | Post a Comment |
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home