Released: April 26, 2006

Health insurance as luxury item

Source: By Victoria Colliver, San Francisco Chronicle

The number of moderate-to-middle-income Americans of working age who lack health insurance has risen dramatically in recent years, a study to be released today found. Forty-one percent of adults with incomes between $20,000 and $40,000 a year did not have health insurance for at least part of 2005, up from 28 percent without coverage in 2001, according to the report by the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based health care policy foundation.

The report illustrates how employers are dropping health coverage or are offering insurance plans that are too expensive for many workers to afford, according to the authors. “These findings paint a disturbing picture of the day-to-day impact of being uninsured on the physical as well as financial health of millions of Americans,” Sara Collins, the Commonwealth Fund’s senior program officer and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

The Commonwealth study found that the percentage of individuals earning less than $20,000 a year without insurance rose to 53 percent, up from 49 percent in 2001. 

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