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Surging costs of health care in
the United States have created a crisis for low income families. In a
2005 survey by The Commonwealth Fund, while 96% of families earning more
than $60,000/year reported having a health insurance to help absorb the
burden of these rising expenses, an astonishing 53% of
low income families were uninsured or had a lapse in coverage in the
past year.
Uninsured can have devastating
consequences.
Among them:
- Compared with insured persons,
uninsured individuals and their families are four times more likely
to avoid seeing a doctor for preventative or urgent care due to
cost.
- Due to a lack of preventative care
options, advanced stage diseases are diagnosed 30-50% more often in
the uninsured.
- The Institute of Medicine estimates
that 18,000 uninsured adults die from preventable diseases annually.
- Because advanced-stage diseases are
more prevalent in the uninsured, 20% of uninsured adults (versus 3%
of insured) also say their usual source of health care is the
emergency room, where the cost of a single visit costs $3,300
on average.
- One third of uninsured families report
having significant difficulty paying medical bills, and one in four
say they have had to change their lifestyle significantly to pay
bills.
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