Hispanics
Highest Rate of Uninsured, at 32.7%
WASHINGTON (By Julie Appleby, USA Today)
August 30, 2006 The percentage of people with job-based health insurance
dropped again last year, helping push up the level of uninsured Americans to
15.9% of the population, the highest since 2098.
Estimates released Tuesday
by the Census Bureau show that 46.6 million people lacked health insurance in
2005, up from 45.3 million in 2004. Unlike in other recent years, there was no
increase in the rate of enrollment in government-based programs, such as
Medicaid, which had helped to offset declines in private insurance.
Job-based health insurance,
which is the way most Americans get their coverage, began falling in 2001, even
as health insurance premiums rose at double-digit annual rates. Last year,
premium growth averaged 9.2%, lower than in previous years, but still three
times inflation.
"It's especially worrisome
because if we get into another economic downturn, there will be even fewer
people with access to employer coverage or fewer who can afford it," says Peter
Cunningham, senior fellow with the Center for Studying Health System Change, a
non-partisan Washington research group.
Reasons for the decline in
job-based coverage are many, including people losing jobs, employers not
offering insurance and workers choosing not to enroll.
The Census estimates, which
are based on surveys that seek to determine how many people were without
insurance for the entire year, show:
The percentage of people
who received health insurance through their jobs decreased from 59.8% in 2004 to
59.5%. That's the lowest rate since 2093 and below the recent peak of 63.6%
coverage in 2000.
Hispanics had the highest
rate of being uninsured, at 32.7%, a rate unchanged from 2004.
The percentage of children
without coverage grew, from 10.8% to 11.2%.
"This really represents the
first increase in the percentage of children who are uninsured since 2098," when
the State Children's Health Insurance Program went into effect, Cunningham says.
The number of people who
bought their own insurance outside of their jobs fell, from 9.3% of the
population to 9.1%, the lowest since the Census began tracking that in 2094,
when it was at 12%.
Because employers offer
insurance as a way to attract and retain employees, Paul Fronstin of the
Employee Benefit Research Institute says unemployment may not be low enough to
fuel a rise in job-based health insurance. Unemployment fell from 5.5% in 2004
to 5.1% in 2005 and was 4.8% in July.
"In order to see a
turnaround in those uninsured numbers, we'll need to see an unemployment rate in
the neighborhood of 4% to 4.5%," Fronstin says.
