A Bellwether for Loss of Insurance
It's no surprise that a new report by the Economic Policy Institute shows that Americans continue to lose employer-provided health care. It's down from 68.3% of all U.S. residents in 2000 to 62.9% in 2007, with government-subsidized care, not private insurance, picking up most of the loss. But deep into the report, the Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters discovered that California, ever the U.S. trendsetter, is even worse off:
"A recent Census Bureau report rated California as having the nation's 8th lowest level of medical insurance among the states, with nearly 7 million of its residents under 65 years old lacking health insurance.
"A new study by the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, paints with an even darker health insurance picture in California - the nation's 5th lowest level of employer-supplied health insurance at 56.3 percent of its population.
"That's about 6 percentage points below the national average, which has been falling steadily, as has California's level. The institute says California's rate of employer-based health insurance has dropped by 3.4 percentage points since 2000, with nearly 221,000 fewer Californians with employer insurance in 2007.
"California's 56.3 percent rate is higher only than Arkansas (55.5 percent), Mississippi (53.7 percent), Texas (53.5 percent) and New Mexico (50.7 percent)."
California has the largest state population and is among the best-off states, though its wide income inequality hides a large population of low-income working people and the very poor. It's also among the states most dependent on smaller businesses, which are the least likely to provide health insurance to employees. Given the loss of U.S. industrial jobs, that's a trend spreading across the rest of the country.
If the whole U.S. had the same rate of uninsured residents as California, the national number would be 57 million, instead of the current estimate of 45 million people uninsured for at least part of the year.
California is so broke that tens of thousands of residents, many of them children, are expected to lose state-subsidized health care next year.The vast majority of families in this dilemma couldn't begin to purchase private insurance even with a $5,000 tax credit, as Sen. McCain has proposed. That is, if insurance companies didn't exclude them first because one of the children has asthma.
What all of this adds up to is that it will be impossible to fix, or even begin to fix, U.S. health care without providing a public alternative like Medicare to all Americans, and firmly regulating the inefficient, profit-driven insurance industry if it wants to stay in the game.