Americans Without Health Insurance Rise to 45 Million
The number of Americans without health insurance climbed for a third straight year in 2003 to a record as the economy lost jobs and companies covered fewer people, a government report showed.
The Census Bureau said 45 million Americans lacked health- care coverage last year, up 3.2 percent from 2002. The total was 15.6 percent of the population, or almost one in six. The previous high was 44.3 million, or 16.3 percent, in 1998.
Employers cut benefits as insurance premiums rose 14 percent last year, six times the rate of inflation and the most since 1990, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. In today's report, the Census said 1.3 million fewer people were covered by company plans than in 2002.
"It's a combination of the economy and the rising cost of providing health-insurance coverage,'' said Paul Fronstin, an economist with the Washington-based Employee Benefit Research Institute, in an interview. ``There's been a drop in manufacturing jobs, which have historically provided better benefits than service jobs."
The report also showed that the number of people covered by government health insurance programs rose to 76.8 million last year from 73.6 million the year before. Dan Weinberg, the Census Bureau's chief of household economic statistics, couldn't say whether state budget cuts in their Medicaid programs affected the number of uninsured.
"You'd have to make 51 calls to 51 Medicaid directors to answer that," he said. "We haven't really looked beyond the data to establish causes. It's hard to say what caused the change in employer based coverage."
The U.S. economy lost 61,000 jobs last year. Three out of five Americans get medical coverage through an employer, said Heather Boushey, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. Eight out of 10 uninsured people were in families in which at least one person had a job, according to the Washington-based Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.
Employers such as Procter & Gamble Co., Honeywell International Inc. and Pitney Bowes Inc. shifted more of the cost to workers, who paid on average 50 percent more last year than they did in 2000, the last year the number of uninsured Americans fell, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, based in Menlo Park, California.
Patty Foux, 56, is among Americans without coverage. The Meshoppen, Pennsylvania, resident quit her job at a Procter & Gamble Co. papermaking plant after she was diagnosed with a heart valve defect two years ago.
The income Foux earns from selling American-Indian themed gifts wasn't enough to pay her health insurance, so she dropped it. She stopped taking medications for her heart condition.
When her doctor told her last year she had a potentially cancerous lump, Foux said she walked into the hospital's parking lot and wept. A worker in the hospital's business office saw her and worked out a way for her to get the surgery. It cost $6,700, and she still owes $5,400.
"There's so many like me out there," Foux said. "We fall through the cracks."
Procter & Gamble raised deductibles and co-payments for the three different health plans offered to employees to lower the company's costs by five percentage points to 75 percent, said spokeswoman Jeannie Tharrington.
"We did it so employees would become wiser consumers of health care, and know what it costs to have these procedures done," she said.
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, a four-term senator from Massachusetts, promised March 6 that his first bill would extend health coverage to most Americans. After today's report, his campaign issued an e-mailed statement in which Kerry said that "5.2 million people have lost health insurance under George Bush, 1.4 million people this year alone.
"All while good paying jobs are disappearing and families struggling to make ends meet are being squeezed by skyrocketing costs for health care, energy and college tuition," the statement continued.
The White House didn't immediately issue a comment from President George W. Bush. His campaign released a statement from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a physician, who said the Census figures ``not only reflect the economic transition of the last year, but a decade-long downward trend in the proportion."
Senate Health Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican whose panel oversees private health coverage, said in an e-mailed comment that today's report "doesn't account for the 1.5 million new jobs that have been created over the past 11 months and overlooks the fact that our manufacturing sector is rebounding strongly."
Bush, 58, is campaigning on the creation of health-savings accounts and a proposal to allow companies to negotiate lower insurance premiums through industry associations. Bush also wants refundable tax credits of as much as $1,000 for individuals and $3,000 for families to help low-income workers buy health insurance.
Kerry, 60, supports allowing Americans to buy prescription drugs in Canada, where government price controls hold costs as much as 70 percent lower than in the U.S. He also urges creation of a federal pool to ease employers' insurance costs. Kerry's plan would cost $653 billion over a decade. Bush's proposals would cost $89 billion.
Uwe Reinhardt, a professor of economics at Princeton University who sits on the Kaiser Commission, said in an Aug. 24 interview that "the crisis is there now for low-income American families."
"Those are people whose family income is less than $35,000, and with this they have to pay taxes, they have to pay rent, mortgages, kids going to college," Reinhardt said. "And then you plunk on top of them a family insurance policy now that's anywhere from $10,000 to $12,000 a year."
Uninsured patients are taxing the hospital industry, which under federal law must treat emergency cases regardless of whether the patient is insured. HCA Inc., the largest U.S. hospital chain, said in an Aug. 6 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that uninsured emergency room visits rose 16.9 percent in the second quarter this year after jumping 26 percent in the first three months.
"Tragically, without insurance many Americans do not seek medical care until their health problem reaches crisis proportions," said American Medical Association President-elect J. Edward Hill. "A decrease in employment-based health insurance coverage, America's liability crisis and a combination of other factors have contributed to an indefensible situation."
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