Health insurance coverage up slightly
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During the first three months of this year, about 46.5 million Americans were uninsured at some point, and 34.2 million had been uninsured for at least 12 months, according to a national health insurance survey issued Wednesday.
That's a slight improvement from the averages tabulated in 2010, when 16 percent of Americans were uninsured at the time of the survey, and 11.7 percent had been without health insurance for more than 12 months. During the first three months of 2011, the percentage of uninsured dropped to 15.3 percent, and 11.2 percent of interviewees had been without coverage for a full year or more.
The report, compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics, also said that the number of uninsured between the ages of 19 and 25 decreased by nearly 1 million, due, in part, to new state and federal laws allowing young adults to stay on parents' insurance coverage longer.
In 2009, for example, the state Legislature and Gov. Ed Rendell passed a law allowing children of insured parents to stay on their parents' coverage until age 30, as long as the young adult is unmarried and has no dependents.
And as of January 2011, similar measures were put in place nationwide as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. As a result, most health plans are making coverage available to children on their parents' policy up to age 26, regardless of their dependent or student enrollment status.
Statistician and study co-author Robin Cohen said the improved insurance coverage rate among the 19 to 25 age group was "statistically significant," as was the finding that high-deductible health plan enrollment is on a dramatic upswing.
In 2007, about 17.5 percent of people who had private insurance were enrolled in some kind of high-deductible plan, which costs less for the subscriber (or the employer that provides the coverage), but costs more out-of-pocket when care is required. From January to March, that percentage was 29 percent -- an increase of almost 12 percentage points.
As has been the case for years, the ranks of the uninsured are found disproportionately in the minority communities: Hispanics and Latinos were nearly three times as likely to be without health insurance as whites and nearly twice as likely as blacks.
Also more likely to be affected were people living in the South and West -- while between 11 and 12 percent of people living in the Northeast and Midwest were uninsured at the time of the survey, 17.1 percent of people living in the South and 18.6 percent of people living in the West were without health insurance.
First Published September 22, 2011 12:00 am
