HEALTH CARE Number of uninsured shows rise, CDC study indicates

Fewer children were without insurance, according to the report.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
WASHINGTON -- The economy started creating jobs again last year, but the number of working-age adults who had gone without health insurance for more than a year jumped sharply, the government reported.
An additional 2.6 million people between the ages of 18 and 64 were uninsured for more than a year, boosting the total to 24.5 million, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The report, released Wednesday by the agency's National Center for Health Statistics, is the government's first statistical look at health-insurance coverage during 2003, when the economy began reversing the job losses that started with the 2001 recession.
The increase in the number of the nation's long-term uninsured, which Robin A. Cohen of the health statistics center called "quite a significant jump," underscored both the increasingly chronic nature of the problem and the decreasing likelihood that a job guarantees access to health insurance, analysts said.
"As we lose jobs in the manufacturing sector to jobs in the service economy and small businesses, we're losing the stability of big employers and replacing it with a much more fragile system," said Diane Rowland, executive director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. "Our uninsured problem is becoming more of a permanent problem instead of a temporary, transitional problem."
Costs of care
Kate Sullivan Hare, executive director of health policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said rising health-care costs were making it more difficult it for employers of all sizes to offer affordable coverage to their workers. As businesses that still offer health insurance pass on more of the costs to their employees, greater numbers of workers are deciding that the coverage is not worth the cost, she said.
The health insurance premium that employed Americans pay for family coverage has increased by almost 50 percent over the past three years, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and voters questioned in public opinion polls consistently cite rising health-care costs and worries about losing health coverage as among their top concerns.
The CDC study determined that a total of 53.1 million Americans of all ages, or 18.6 percent of the population, went without health coverage for some part of 2003, a slight increase from 2002. Of those, 28.5 million, or 10 percent of the population, had been uninsured for more than a year.
The one bright spot in the report was a continuing decline in the number of uninsured children. Because of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, created by Congress in 1997, the percentage of children who were uninsured for some part of the year declined from 14.6 percent in 2002 to 13.7 percent in 2003.