Health Insurance Coverage in the U.S. Lacking for 46 Million Americans

Health Insurance Coverage in the U.S. Lacking for 46 Million Americans

Health Insurance Coverage in the U.S. Lacking for 46 Million Americans




Yesterday the Center for Disease Control (CDC) released two reports conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) on the nation’s health insurance coverage. The reports gave us a glimpse into estimates garnered from a national survey conducted in 2009. There are some staggering numbers in the report, the biggest being that 46.3 Americans are uninsured, a figure that may just make you think twice about the passage of health care reform bill.

In 2009, 46.3 million persons of all ages (15.4%) were uninsured at the time of interview, 58.5 million (19.4%) had been uninsured for at least part of the year prior to interview, and 32.8 million (10.9%) had been uninsured for more than a year at the time of interview. Of those uninsured, 21.1% were adults aged 18-64, 8.2% were children under the age of 18, and the remaining 17% was attributed to seniors over the age of 64. With the COBRA health care subsidies ending, this number is likely to rise over the next year.

According to a CDC report, the largest problem for Americans who lacked insurance for part of the year correlated with the lack of employment, as 60.6 percent of unemployed adults (ages 18 to 64) experienced a lack of health coverage during that time as compared to only 21.8 percent of employed adults. And of the people uninsured for more than a year, 32.9 percent of them were unemployed, while only 13.3 percent of them were employed. With the U.S. financial crisis rendering many people unemployed or underemployed, health insurance has become one of the casualties

Not surprisingly, the largest uninsured group was aged 18-24, those out of high school, who were not enrolled or under-enrolled in college (and thereby unable to take advantage of their parent’s health insurance), unemployed, or working in jobs that do not offer health care coverage. Typically wages earned in this demographic cannot be stretched to buy an individual health insurance policy.

Lack of health insurance coverage was greatest in the South and West regions of the United States. Among adults who lacked a high school diploma, 32.9% were uninsured at the time of interview, 36.4% had been uninsured for at least part of the past year, and 27.4% had been uninsured for more than a year at the time of interview. These rates are two to more than three times as high as those for persons with more than a high school education. Approximately one in four persons under age 65 in Florida and Texas, and one in five persons under age 65 in California and Georgia, lacked coverage at the time of interview. (Although a recent study conducted by the Center for Health Policy Research at UCLA showed that 1 in 4 Californians lacked health care coverage.)

The number of Americans insured under private plans dropped over the last year by almost 3%, with approximately two-thirds (65.8%) of adults aged 18-64 covered by a private plan, compared with 55.7% of children under age 18. Those covered by public plans consisted of 21% total, more than one-third of them being children.