By Kathy Waller
The Coloradoan
October 1, 2007
The numbers are in, and every citizen needs to pay attention.
The U.S. Census Bureau recently released data on health insurance coverage in the United States. For 2006, 47 million Americans were uninsured, an increase of 2.18 million from the previous year. In other words, one in 6 Americans does not have any health insurance. In every other industrialized country in the world, the number of uninsured is zero.
The increase in the number of uninsured Americans from 2005 to 2006 is the biggest jump reported by the Census Bureau since 1992. There are now more uninsured people in the United States than at any time since the passage of Medicare & Medicaid in the mid-1960s.
Strikingly, nearly all of the increase in uninsured over the past year (2.02 million of the 2.18 million) was concentrated among middle-class Americans making over $50,000 per year.
More than half of the newly uninsured (56.4 percent) are full-time workers. Maybe this is because the average health-insurance premium for a family of four is just over $12,000 per year (not including deductibles and co-pays). Hardworking, middle-class Americans are now feeling the distress of being uninsured. Many of us are only one illness or accident away from financial ruin.
More numbers: Private health insurance companies made $40 billion in profit last year, while it would cost $54 billion to cover all of the uninsured.
In Colorado, there are 792,000 uninsured, including 180,000 children.
Now for some good news. Here in Colorado, the 208 Commission (a bipartisan group created by the state Legislature) solicited input and requested health-care reform proposals from the people of the state. Of 31 proposals submitted, they narrowed the choices to four and sent them to an independent health-care analysis group to determine the potential impacts on health spending and coverage in Colorado.
Three of the proposals are based upon combinations of public and private health insurance, some with mandates requiring individuals and/or employers to purchase health insurance. The fourth proposal is a single-payer plan, pooling the risk of all residents into a single fund, minimizing the administrative costs and eliminating the profit motive from health insurance (a fifth proposal, also a combination of public and private insurance, was created by the commission; it was sent for analysis later and the results are still pending).
The results were released last month, and the numbers are astounding. The three plans that give private insurance a continued role are estimated to cost the state between $595 million and $1.3 billion, and still leave between 109,000 and 467,000 people without adequate health insurance. The single-payer plan will save the state $1.4 billion and everyone will be covered.
Let’s repeat that for emphasis. The single-payer plan will provide coverage for everyone and save more than a billion dollars for Colorado taxpayers. The other plans cost millions of dollars and still leave hundreds of thousands of people uninsured.
We have a unique opportunity in Colorado to show the rest of the country how to achieve efficient, affordable, universal health coverage. Single-payer is the only plan that makes sense. To learn more and get involved, visit www.healthcareforallcolorado.org and www.pnhp.org. From medical, moral and economic perspectives, we just can’t afford to sit around and wait for the numbers to get even worse.
Kathy Waller, MD, MPH, lives in Fort Collins.