The Commonwealth Fund released an interesting study earlier this week. It looked at the reasons behind why so many people do not currently have health insurance. The results show that the reason is not because the majority of people are simply choosing to go without health insurance. Instead, their lack of health insurance is due to a multitude of complications.
If you are one of the lucky few, you are able to get your health insurance through your employer. If you are unemployed, or if you don’t qualify for the health insurance plan that your employer offers some employees, then you are likely to encounter great difficulty when you attempt to find health insurance that you can actually afford.
A report was released this week by an advocacy group called the Commonwealth Fund. They found that 71% of the estimated 26 million Americans who attempted to buy an individual health insurance policy in the past three years had some kind of complications that prevented them from being able to purchase it. The same report found that 52 million Americans went without medical coverage for all of, or part of, the year 2010. Compare that to 2001, when only 38 million Americans lacked health insurance.
What were some of the complications that prevented people from finding health insurance? One was job loss. The report found that out of the 43 million adults who lost their jobs sometime in the past two years, nine million of them became completely uninsured. Many were unable to continue their employer sponsored insurance through COBRA, because COBRA was too expensive.
Another complication people faced came when insurance companies rejected applicants. The report found that 35% of the people who applied for health insurance were either turned down because of their medical history, or were charged a much higher price because of it. I would hazard a guess that the higher cost would be what prevented that group from being able to afford the health insurance.
The report said that 16 million adults found it difficult or impossible to find a health insurance plan that they could afford (regardless of their medical history). 43% of people were completely unable to find a health insurance plan that fit their needs.
In other words, according to this study, the reason why so many people do not have health insurance is not because they are simply choosing not to have it. People really do want the financial protection that health insurance can provide. Most would purchase it if they could afford to do so.
Image by Katy Warner on Flickr