Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Last week I reviewed a paper the sought to understand why people don’t buy health insurance. A key finding was that there health insurance purchase was correlated with income, but not perfectly. One reason was that the cost of other goods–especially housing–affected individuals ability to purchase insurance. The paper was getting at whether health insurance…
The simple answer is, they can’t afford it. This may be a good argument for low-income individuals but for middle class and even upper middle class individuals we see people going without health insurance. The question is why. If income was the whole story, we would observe different incomes levels would have closer to 100%…
Although Health Reform has passed, many of its mandates–such as Health Insurance Exchanges–have not yet been implemented. As the cost of health care has been growing over time, the number of uninsured has also been growing. The California Health Care Foundation examines the uninsured in California in more detail. Although Texas has the highest share…
Of the 6.6 million uninsured children in the nation, 4.3 million are eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Approximately 2.8 million children come from families at or near the federal poverty line (FPL). Despite the fact that millions of children are uninsured, children’s participation rates in Medicaid/CHIP are increasing. Today I…
Because it expands health insurance coverage, one of the key effects of the recently passed health reform bill is that it will decrease the amount of compensated care. According to an Urban Institute study: “…the cost of uncompensated care will fall from $62.1 billion in 2009 to $46.6 billion in 2019 under the Senate bill,…
Most workers have employer-provided health insurance. The old have Medicare and the poor Medicaid. Children have SCHIP and veterans have the VA. But what about the people who fall through the cracks? What about individuals who work for small businesses who don’t offer insurance, entrepreneurs, or illegal immigrants? Where can they get health care? An…
Currently there are about 45 million uninsured individuals in the United States. The Urban Institute predicts would happen to the number of individuals uninsured under the following of reforms. Expand Medicaid to individuals with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line (FPL): 17 million uninsured would receive insurance Provide subsidies to individuals…
The Immigration Policy Center believes not. Some evidence they give includes: Ku (AJPH 2009) reports that “immigrants’ medical costs averaged about 14% to 20% less than those who were US born.” Four out of five people in America who have no insurance are U.S. citizens. The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research found that in 2005 one out of every five…
A recent report from Cover the Insured.org reviews the how health insurance trends have evolved over the last ten to fifteen years. The percent of uninsured individuals has increased from 16.0% of the population in 1995 to 17.5% of the population in 2006. The increase is entirely due to the increase in uninsurance among working…
Everyone knows that health insurance is getting more and more expensive. But how can we measure how expensive it is? A paper by UC-San Diego professors Richard Kronick and Todd Gilmer creates an “affordability index” to measure this. The affordability index is equal to the per-capita, non-elderly health spending divided by the median income. In…