Lose a job, lose insurance

With every passing month in America's "jobless recovery," more jobs are lost. Lost jobs in the U.S. quickly morph into uninsured lives. In April 2008, the Kaiser Family Foundation calculated a metric that showed a 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 1.1 million person increase in the uninsured and a 1 million person increase in Medicaid enrollment.

That was April 2008 -- this is November 2009. State governors, who fund one-half of Medicaid, are hard-pressed to absorb these hundreds of thousands of lives. Then what? The number of the uninsured increases.

"I'm insured, so should I care?" ask Harry and Louise. Based on recent surveys on American attitudes about the health-care safety net for people 'other than me,' it appears the European model of social insurance is seen by many American health citizens, still, as socialism, not insurance.

The sooner we get uninsured people covered -- while rewarding quality care, not paying for poor outcomes, moving our paper-based system to digital platforms and better managing the allocation of scarce health resources -- the better. Yes, it's complicated. But with each passing month in the jobless recovery, more people will move into the uninsured pool of Americans. Watch for emergency room waits and hospital/provider bad debt to grow.

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn  |  November 19, 2009; 9:17 AM ET  | Category:  Economic crisis , Insurance Save & Share:                 
Previous: Not Lucy Ricardo, but not Godot | Next: We need a strong public option

The comments to this entry are closed.