The number of people in this country who have health insurance but not the ability to afford adequate medical care continues to climb.
About 25 million Americans — or approximately one of every five adults younger than age 65 with health insurance — did not have sufficient coverage last year to shield them from financial hardship if they ended up in the emergency room or were seriously ill, according to a new study to be released on Tuesday by the Commonwealth Fund.
“We’re moving in a direction where you can be insured all year and still face medical bankruptcy,” said Cathy Schoen, the study’s lead author and a senior vice president for research and evaluation at the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation in New York specializing in health research.
The relentless rise in the cost of medical care, combined with a growing number of insurance plans that require patients to pay a higher portion of their medical bills has led to a 60 percent increase in the number of underinsured adults from 2003 to 2007, according to the study. The Commonwealth Fund first calculated the number of underinsured in 2003 when it estimated that 16 million Americans did not have sufficient coverage.
As the nation debates how best to improve its health care system, including how to insure the increasing number of Americans without coverage, policy makers also need to discuss the quality of available coverage, said Karen Davis, the president of the Commonwealth Fund.
“Lack of insurance is only part of the problem, as even the insured have serious gaps in coverage,” she said.
The study, to be published by the medical policy journal Health Affairs, also indicates that the sharpest increase in the underinsured were middle-class families whose coverage still left them vulnerable to medical costs equal to 10 percent more of their incomes. While coverage offered by large companies remains fairly generous, people who try to buy individual policies or who are covered through small companies increasingly must settle for policies that require high deductibles or that sharply limit the benefits as way of reducing the size of the premiums.