Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Billions on Public Health for Full-time Workers, Pt1 -- Why is this?

According to The Advance for Health Information’s Daily News Update, The Commonwealth Fund, in their on-going quest to assist in overcoming our nation’s health insurance failure, have provided some further insight to the problems. They have noted that the public, even now, is being burdened with $45 billion in health insurance coverage and unpaid health care costs because full-time workers and their family members who don’t have employer health coverage. The leading causes of this expense are the $33 billion spent on public coverage such as Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program and the $12 billion lost in uncompensated care expenses. These benefits are provided to uninsured workers and dependents. They are funded by federal, state and local governments and shifted to other payers.

Sherry Glied and Bisundev Mahato at Columbia University have issued a report untitled: "Who Pays for Health Care When Workers Are Uninsured?" The report brings out the trend. Of the 19 million full-time workers and their dependents w/o employee health insurance in 2004, 11 million of these were enrolled in public programs – or 58%. Whereas in 1999, 16 million full-time workers and their dependents were w/o employee health insurance and only 6 million were enrolled in public programs – or 38%. This represents almost a 70% increase over that five-year period. What can we learn from this?

1) That the number of uninsured working families has risen by 3 million people over those 5 years.
2) That the public health systems covered 11 million people that, otherwise, had no health insurance.
3) That the trend toward public health care has been highly favorable (up almost 70%).
4) The bottom line inference is that those footing the bill didn’t realize that they were paying and, almost certainly, want it handled differently.

This may be public an area of opportunity for Commonwealth Fund to lend a hand.

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