Besides being an unwelcome burden on employers, misguided status quo defenders ( who have also been fervent climate change deniers) have this reality to deal with:
(http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z276/fayeforcure/healthchart1.jpg)
More Americans Losing Health Insurance Every Day
Analysis of Health Coverage Losses During the Recession
SOURCE: Ap/Charlie Neibergall
Workers at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Iowa report a sharp rise in the number of women who need help paying for care in recent months.
By Nayla Kazzi | May 4, 2009
Download this report (pdf)
Interactive Map: Working Adults Are Losing Their Health Insurance
Interactive Map: Dramatic Increase in the Uninsured Rate in Every State
The fear of losing your job is a familiar feeling to many Americans today. And for the nearly six-in-ten Americansâ€"59.3 percentâ€"receiving health care through their employer, that fear is often exacerbated by the anxiety that losing a job also means loss of health care coverageâ€"not just for the worker, but often for their family as well.
While the share of workers relying on employment-based health care coverage has declined from its peak of 64.2 percent in 2000, access to adequate affordable health care for a majority of Americans is still contingent on their employment status.
Employers are shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs every monthâ€"just last month employment declined by 663,000â€"and the number of uninsured Americans continues to rise.
Sixty-two percent of the American public believes that the current economic turmoil makes it more important than ever to take on health care reform, and the need for comprehensive reform becomes all the more evident as conditions in the economy continue to deteriorate and more Americans become uninsured.
Estimating the rise in the number of uninsured
Forty-six million Americans lacked health care coverage in 2007, when the national employment level peaked and before the current economic recession officially began. Today, that number is markedly higher as many workers who have lost their jobs have also lost their employer-provided health insurance.
Employers have shed 5.1 million jobs in the last 15 months. Three industries aloneâ€"manufacturing, construction, and professional and business servicesâ€"account for nearly three-quarters of total jobs lost. Manufacturing has shed 1.5 million jobsâ€"1.1 million in durable goods, 367,000 in nondurable goods manufacturingâ€"construction has eliminated 1.1 million jobs; and professional and business services have cut 1.2 million positions.
We estimate that 2.4 million workers have lost the health coverage their jobs provided since the start of the recession, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Approximately, 1.3 million of these losses have occurred in the last four months. More than 320,000 Americans lost their employer-provided health insurance in March alone, which amounts to approximately 10,680 workers a day.
The table below shows, by industry, the number of jobs lost in the recession, the share of workers who held coverage through these jobs in 2007, and an estimate of the number of workers who have lost this coverage. The estimate of workers who have lost their health insurance is based on the assumption that the newly unemployed had employer-provided health insurance in the same proportion as all workers in their industry. The estimates, however, do not reflect the full extent of health coverage loss due to lost employment. They include only individuals who receive coverage directly from an employer, not those who receive coverage through a family member or spouse’s employer. Estimates for the rise in the number of uninsured are therefore a conservative estimate of the number affected, since it leaves out spouses and children who may have also lost coverage as a result of a spouse or parent losing their jobs. [1]
All industries except fourâ€"natural resources and mining, utilities, education and health services, and governmentâ€"saw declines in their payroll employment over the last 15 months.
Employees in the durable goods manufacturing sector bore the greatest burden of the losses in coverage with approximately 733,600 workers becoming uninsured since December 2007. Durable goods manufacturing is followed by professional and business services, where 553,200 workers lost employer-based coverage, and construction where another 385,800 workers have lost employer-based coverage since the recession began.
The worst losses have been in recent months. More than 1 million workers lost health care coverage in the first three months of 2009, which is 42 percent of the total losses since December 2007. Approximately, 268,400 more workers lost health care coverage in March 2009 than in March 2008. Month-by-month estimates of the rising number of uninsured demonstrate how the pace of contraction in the labor market has affected the number of people with health insurance.
More men have lost access to health care coverage than women
Men are more likely to have employer-provided health insurance than their female counterparts in industries where both men and women are employed. This, in conjunction with the fact that male-dominated industries such as construction and manufacturing have fared worse in this recession than female-dominated industries, has exacerbated the impact of job loss on health coverage.
The chart below shows the share of workers with employer-provided health insurance by industry and by gender. Again, the shares below only include workers who obtain health care coverage directly from an employer, excluding individuals who receive coverage through a family member or spouse.
Approximately, 1.7 million men have lost employer-provided health insurance from their jobs as of February 2009, compared to approximately 396,800 women. Below is a chart with month-by-month changes in the number of men and women with employer-provided health insurance due to changes in employment. It is clear that men have been hit the hardest in the last 15 months, though the number of uninsured women is also compounding.
Conclusion
The rapid loss of health coverage demonstrates the fundamental instability of health insurance protections in our current system and the need for comprehensive health reform. As President Barack Obama asserted in a White House forum in March, “Health care reform is no longer just a moral imperative, it is a fiscal imperative… If we want to create jobs and rebuild our economy, then we must address the crushing cost of healthcare this year, in this administration.†The time to deliver quality, affordable health care coverage to our nation’s families is now. The American people cannot afford another missed opportunity.
Endnotes
[1] A Center for American Progress previous analysis, based on January’s unemployment numbers, estimated that 14,000 Americans were losing health insurance daily. That analysis relied on methods used to estimate the impact of unemployment on insurance losses from all sources.
Download this report (pdf)
More Information:
Interactive Map: Working Adults Are Losing Their Health Insurance
Interactive Map: Dramatic Increase in the Uninsured Rate in Every State
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/05/insurance_loss.html
Please click link for the most excellent charts,.........as they say: a picture speaks a thousand words.
When you start off with a strawman like...
Quotemisguided status quo defenders
You do yourself NO favors. I cannot think of one poster who is in favor of the status quo. We simply are opposed to the complete dismantling of our current system.
Quote from: BridgeTroll on June 04, 2009, 02:09:59 PM
I cannot think of one poster who is in favor of the status quo. We simply are opposed to the complete dismantling of our current system.
How is saying "you can keep your insurance if you like it, but we are going to offer a public option alongside the traditional employer-based healthcare insurance system," a complete overhaul?
It's simply adding onto what we already have, rather than expanding the status quo.
Waiting for health care to be a right, not a privilege
By Tom Walsh
I’m pushing 60, but it wasn’t until recently that I took the biggest risk of my life: I went without health insurance coverage for four whole days.
While that may not sound like a big deal to many of the estimated 50 million Americans who don’t have or can’t afford health insurance, it was a first for me. When I recently switched jobs, there was a four-day lag between my old coverage running out and my new coverage kicking in.
Friends and family advised me not to leave the house. If I was fool enough to do so, they suggested that I venture forth within a cocoon of Bubble Wrap, lest some drunken driver run me off the road and put me into intensive care. Even a few days there would pretty much ensure that, without insurance, I’d be penniless, homeless and destitute.
About half of the personal bankruptcies in America are now the direct result of mounting medical bills or the costs of a medical emergency. Ironically, many of those people who are forced to cash out to pay medical bills had health insurance, just not sufficient coverage to pay all the bills. That doesn’t happen in Canada.
While Canada’s universal health care system has its own set of issues, being able to afford health care isn’t among them. A Canadian may be forced to wait six months for coronary bypass surgery, but she won’t face a mountain of debt after the fact, as there is no direct cost beyond taxes allocated to health care delivery from province to province. Bottom line is this: No one in Canada ever faced bankruptcy because of illness or injury.
It was 1974 when I arrived in Washington, D.C., as a reporter to cover, among other issues, a new-fangled concept being pushed by Teddy Kennedy, something called “national health insurance.†Just as they are now, well-entrenched special interests that line their pockets by providing inadequate care through a deeply flawed health care delivery system were making sure then that universal, government-funded access to health care would never happen. There was just too much for them to lose and too little for them to gain as the middlemen between doctor and patient. And, 35 years later, there still is.
Every president and presidential candidate since Richard Nixon has promised some sort of health care reform. Not surprisingly, it has never happened. The enormity of the task of meaningful health care reform makes it the Mount Everest of social and political issues.
The political reality is that those who need universal health care most â€" children, the elderly, the poor and the millions with jobs but no benefits â€" are those with the least political clout. Those with the most political clout are well-entrenched in the status quo system that rations health care not through waiting times, as in Can-ada, but through income. In America, those with means have access to health care and, most likely, health care insurance. Those who don’t, don’t. It’s yet another application of the golden rule: Those with the gold make the rules.
As America embarks on a new approach to government, let’s hope that an overhaul of health care and public access to it is high not only on President Obama’s reform agenda, but those of Congress. Like most issues his administration faces, there won’t be a quick fix. Nonetheless, 35 years of meaningless political rhetoric seems quite enough, thank you.
I may be pushing 80 before health care in America is viewed as a right, not a privilege. Until then, I’ll just have to continue to cling to the strong belief that has kept me both healthy and debt-free: The only way to survive the American health care system is to do all you can to stay out of it.
Tom Walsh of Gouldsboro is a former journalist. His analysis of the Canadian health care system recently won a special award from the New England Press Association.
http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/108067.html