47 Million Americans Lack Health Insurance: Report
NEW YORK - The number of Americans lacking health insurance rose by nearly 8.6 million to 47 million from 2000 to 2006, with children and workers from every income level losing coverage, a new report said on Thursday.
The increase was “driven primarily by the continued erosion in employer-provided health insurance,” said the report by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute.
In 2006, 2.3 million fewer Americans received health benefits from their employers than in 2000, the report said, noting the decline does not take the population increase into account.
Nearly 60 percent of the nation’s children are covered by the insurance provided by their parents’ employers, but 3.4 million fewer children had benefits in 2006 compared with 2000.
“Public health insurance is no longer offsetting these losses,” said the report by the nonpartisan think-tank.
For jobholders, this was the sixth straight year of declines in health insurance coverage. The rate fell to just below 71 percent from nearly 75 percent in 2000.
“No category of workers was insulated from loss of coverage,” as even workers whose earnings placed them in the top quintile saw coverage rates fall, the report said.
More men lost employer-provided health benefits than women. For men, the rate fell by almost 5 percentage points in the six-year period to 69 percent. For women, the rate fell just under 3 percentage points to nearly 73 percent.
Native Americans had the highest rates of insurance coverage from employers at almost 74 percent, though that was a drop of 3.5 percentage points. The rate for people born in other countries just topped 54 percent in 2006, 4.4 percentage points less than in 2000.
Whites had the highest rates of employer-provided health insurance, at 76.4 percent, though that was off 3.3 percentage points in the six-year period.
For blacks, the overall rate was nearly 66 percent, but off 2.6 percentage points from 2000. Hispanics had only a 48.4 percent rate of coverage, down 5 percentage points.
White-collar workers saw their coverage rates fall 3.5 percentage points to 61.4 percent. The drop for blue-collar workers was steeper, down 5.6 percentage points to 53.4 percent from 2000 to 2006.
The service sector’s rate fell 5 percentage points — and its employer-provided coverage rate was much lower at just under 29 percent.
Among the states, only Hawaii saw an increase in the percentage of its population under 65 years old who had employer-provided health insurance, up 0.5 percentage point to just over 71 percent in the survey period.
“The decline in employer coverage was pervasive and felt throughout the country,” the report said.
Thirty-eight states saw “significant” drops in benefits provided by employers for people under 65, the report said. Utah, South Carolina, Maryland and Georgia all saw rates drop by at least 7 percentage points.
Meanwhile, in California “nearly all of the losses in employment-based coverage occurred among children,” the report said, noting 600,000 fewer children had such benefits in 2006 compared with 2000.
© 2007 Reuters
Perhaps it will take many more being without health insurance (or perhaps to realize that they’re under insured) before meaningful action will be taken–say 100 million, but time will tell. It all depends on how uncomfortable the majority becomes with believing the propaganda of big Insurance and Pharma, and not looking at the word “socialism” as being a Halloween ghoul.
Same old framing here.
The insurance industry is the problem, not the solution.
Americans need affordable access to health care.
Why should the employers have to provide benefits anyway?
They don’t in the other 29 of 30 most industrialized countries.
If our corporations were not so tied to insurance companies, they would complain loud and long about ability to compete fairly. But they don’t.
The American health care tradition, no doubt, is born out of chattel slavery and company towns in which laborers were sort of like cattle in relation to their employers. Their health care, and often their housing, was a responsibility of their “owners.”
Our government, at least the interest in serving ordinary people, has remained unusually stunted among western industrial nations.
employer-provided health coverage in the USA (along with pensions) was a result of farmer/labor activism and FDR’s wish to be reelected coming together. these were poor compromises compared to what the working class in europe was able to gain for itself.
Can the American people break out of the capitalist prison and embrace social democracy?
I’m totally baffled by the non-action of corporate America on this issue. The big 3 automakers claim that they can’t be competitive because of the burden of healthcare costs they bear compared to their foreign competition. Wal-Mart and other low-wage/low-benefit corporations are constantly berated for failing to provide adequate coverage for their employees. These guys could shake up the system and demand single-payer not-for-profit healthcare in this country and swing the tide. Instead they suffer the blows of a broken system, though not nearly as severely as their employees do.
This number although a high number is low I am sure it’s closer to 100million
goner
The leaders of America don’t want to pay the health expenses for the baby boomers as they go into old age.
I think people are going to die and thats what the corporate leaders want.
That is a cold assessment but when we were lied to about tobacco and told it did not damage health, some of the thinking behind that was that people would be good workers for many years then die from tobacco related illnesses before reaching old age, when health expenses are so high and worker productivity is so low.
And where will the new health insurance be given in the future?..to the young ..because those are future workers and it is to the benefit of corporations to have young healthy highly productive workers.
The corporate leaders think in terms of getting high productivity at the lowest cost possible, even when considering the health of human beings.
I’m going to preempt Daniel David and other retailers of everything Democrat by reminding everyone that the health insurance debacle is a bi-partisan effort. Neither party has wanted to do anything because politicians of both get so much loot from the insurance industry.
I’ve read that the highest percentage of health care is used in the last year(s) of life. Boomers (and I am one) will be cruising into that territory soon and we will break the system completely. Maybe that’s what it will take.
As long as the people in general will continue to somehow be spoonfed the idea that access to health care is always a pure matter of “personal responsibility” starting the instant you’re 18, I don’t see any changes till the numbers are drastically worse. Thing is, the statistics are already misleading at best - and so is the idea it’s a pure matter of personal responsibility. Also, if it’s personal responsibility for an adult to somehow arrange their own access to health care why isn’t it also that adult’s own responsibility to arrange access to health care for their own children? There’s a blatant bit of hypocrisy involved in saying that health care is an unconditional human right till the stroke of 18, but suddenly a matter of personal responsibility at 18 when no matter what your age there can be insurmountable obstacles to obtaining life sustaining that have little or nothing to do with choice or responsibility.
One question I’d love to see answered about this oft quoted number “47 million lack insurance” - of those who have “insurance” how many of those are people who’ve been forced one way or another onto public plans just to get life sustaining care or care made necessary by a disability? I know that’s an increasingly common issue among childless adults who have pre-existing health conditions and a growing reason for ending up on SSI/SSDI largely because without the health care you have absolutely no chance of being employable and with your health condition even less chance of buying individual insurance.
We can solve it now or solve it later, we can pay now or pay later - but one way or another we’re going to eventually have to as a society do both.
With the economy starting to fizzle out, housing in decline, gas prices going up, and a war going on, it will no doubt be argued this is no time to discuss national health care. Everything is ultimately spun to coincide with our level of ignorance, which officials and corporate leaders have learned how to play like a flute.
47 ,million! Hey America, you proud of these statistics?
The simple truth is that we CANNOT afford to provide health insurance to 300 million people in this country. Think of our debt obligations: future SS/Medicare obligations, 9 trillion national debt; no manufacturing base, a “real” unemployment figure of about 13-15%, costs to rebuild our infrastructure, etc. You’ve read and heard all the problems we face - there simply isn’t enough money to cover everyone nor any way to generate it even if we withdraw from Iraq tomorrow.
If people in power really cared about their fellow citizens, this would not be happening. It speaks loudly about those in power, and what they care about, which is profits for their friends in the health industry, and not a dam about people. They are sick and twisted.
If you can’t pay to stay healthy you deadbeats then do your great country a favor and quite simply shuffle off your (poor) mortal coil as cheaply as possible. Amerika needs your taxes for more important things such as terrorizing half the planet and slaughtering the rest!
“There is a single theme behind all our work - we must reduce population levels,” said Thomas Ferguson, the Latin American case officer for the State Department’s Office of Population Affairs. “Either they (governments) do it our way, through nice clean methods or they will get the kind of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran, or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it “The professionals,” said Ferguson, “aren’t interested in lowering population for humanitarian reasons. That sounds nice. We look at resources and environmental constraints. We look at our strategic needs, and we say that this country must lower its population or else we will have trouble.”
http://planetquo.com/The-Haig-Kissinger-Depopulation-Policy
Health…nay life itself is a product, damn it, and if you freeloading socialists can’t afford to pay for it then ….shucks too bad.
“Don’t believe them when they tell me,
‘There ain’t no cure’
while the rich stay healthy
and the sick stay poor.” –
Bono, God Part II …
“A familiar paradox about leftist celebrities in the entertainment industry is that their embrace of progressivism almost never includes a wholehearted embrace of progressive taxation
…
Bono, the rock star and campaigner against Third World debt, is asking the Irish government to contribute more to Africa. At the same time, he’s reducing tax payments that could help fund that aid.”
Of course coming from brand amerika Irish hypocrite par excellence and Mr. Forbes magazine to boot you can take the Boner quote as advertising slogan more than a rich fat cat plea for justice.
We cannot afford health care? OK, just tell at leasst 47,000,000 people to die right now! We do not need “coverage.” That is just an insurance company’s definition of “profit.” What this country needs is health CARE. The culture of “I got mine” is bankrupt and downright evil. We must care for each other. Health CARE is a right, not a privilege, and that fact is acknowledged in most other “developed nations.”
Do you want to be the next George Bush, and tell millions of people they have to “sacrifice” (read: die) themselves on his altar, so insurance companies can become even more bloated and wealthy?
Better yet, do you want to step up to the altar?
“Native Americans had the highest rates of insurance coverage from employers at almost 74 percent, though that was a drop of 3.5 percentage points.”
That sounds pretty good unless you consider that on many reservations unemployement can be as high as 80 percent. Who wrote this article anyway?
All this talk about Americans needing health insurance, is really in my view, just a smoke screen. What we need is clean food, air, water and simple lifestyle. Arguing about how and who gets health insurance, is feeding the machine. If we as a nation, learned how to live more healthy, we wouldn’t need to be so worried about paying doctors/hospital/insurance/pharmaceuticals (all in bed together) bills. We need to favor, alternative/preventative health practices.
Wake up folks, smell the chamomile (smile). Get into some good healthy regimes, take care of your bodies, and eat right. Learn how to grow your own veggies, find out what they are doing to food (GMO for example)? Take some time out of that hectic consumer addiction, to live in the moment.
That is what is going to make your life better, not getting a pre paid health insurance package, at a job that is killing you.
I had a job like that, sure I had health insurance, but by the time I got around to using it, it was going to be a full blown heart attack or stroke from all the stress of that job. I live simple today, and my stress is finally leaving and my health is returning. sorry that is just my view….
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