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Monday, August 15, 2005

Got Health Insurance?

Got health insurance? Chances are even if you do, you know someone who doesn't have it. For some time the popular figure has been close to 50 million Americans are without health insurance. But a recent study conducted by Families USA puts this number in a new light. It found:

82 Million People, Including Many in the Middle Class,Were Uninsured At Some Point Over The Past Two Years;Most Were Uninsured For At Least Nine Months

The number we usually get is based on only those who had no health coverage for the entire calendar year. As you can see, that shaves the number down quite a bit. Either way you look at it, though, the number continues to rise. From 2002 to 2003 we saw an increase from "14.6% to 15.2%" of the population without health care.

Here's where it gets scary, though. You've heard of all those crazy countries in Europe, and our good neighbor to the north, and the Japanese that provide health care to all of their citizens, right? They must spend a fortune doing that, right? Wrong.

Get this: We spend more than any nation on earth--private and public spending combined--on health care and yet we have tens of millions of Americans without any coverage! According to Nationmaster (which bases its stats on the CIA factbook and other refrence materials) we spend a whopping $4,631 per capita on health care in this country. So guess what a country like the United Kingdom spends per capita to insure all of its citizens with superior health care: $1,764! Is someone kidding me? One of the other top-notch health care systems in the world is Japan which spends a meager $2,011 per capita. If this doesn't make you mad, you're not paying attention.

But it gets worse. This is hitting the average American hard. Recent studies show that medical bills are a main culprit in bankruptcies:

The American middle class is solid and secure and prosperous -- we are unlike anything ever known in history -- yet American families live just one illness or accident away from complete financial collapse," one of the study authors, Elizabeth Warren, said yesterday.

It goes on to say:

About 500,000 people sought bankruptcy protection in the United States last year because of the crushing burden of medical expenses, says the study, to be published next month in Norton's Bankruptcy Adviser, a specialty periodical for lawyers.

Are you following along? If you are, none of this should make a lick of sense. How can it be that we spend more on health care than any nation on earth and yet have over 80 million people without any coverage in a given year? And if we're spending so damn much, how is it that we had 500,000 of our fellow Americans filing bankruptcy thanks to high medical bills? Finally, if the United Kingdom and Japan and other nations on this planet of ours can manage to insure all of their citizens with superior health care for about half of what we spend, do you think we should maybe ask them for some advice?

So just how does the United States rank in the world of health care? According to a study done by the World Health Organization (WHO):

The U. S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country but ranks 37 out of 191 countries according to its performance, the report finds. The United Kingdom, which spends just six percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on health services, ranks 18th . Several small countries – San Marino, Andorra, Malta and Singapore are rated close behind second- placed Italy.

So there you go, folks. We're spending double what anybody else is spending (or close to it) and we come in a dismal 37th place. That's sad.

But I know what you're thinking: those people must be poor or there must be something wrong with them, right? Actually the study by Familes USA found:

Four out of five of the uninsured were in working families, according to the report. Of those working families, the report found that significant portions of the middle class were uninsured. For example, among people with incomes between 300 and 400 percent of the federal poverty level (between $55,980 and $74,640 in annual income for a family of four in 2003), more than one out of four were uninsured over the past two years.

The point? We need to get our act together. This is becoming a huge problem with no solution in sight. You can't look at these numbers and not see a problem. We've got to push for universal health care in this country; it needs to be one of the big issues in upcoming elections. Let the battle begin.

posted at 9:15:00 PM by David Buccola

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