Access To Health Insurance
The United States does not have universal health care or a system of socialized medicine. Health insurance may be provided as an employee benefit, while unemployed, part-time, and self-employed workers must often pay for their own insurance. As of 2001, 41.2 million people in the United States (14.6% of the US population) had no health insurance coverage, though a significant portion of those are in the U.S. without proper documentation. By 2004, this had risen to 45 million (15.6%). The U.S. Census Bureau attributed the drop primarily to the loss of employer-provided plans due to the economic downturn and a continuation of rising costs.
A recent Harvard University study found that medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. The study found that many declaring bankruptcy were part of the middle class and were employed before they became ill, but had lost their health insurance by the time they declared bankruptcy. In the U.S., people leaving a job can continue with their former employer's health insurance plan under the COBRA at a rate that is usually double the rate the employee paid while employed. When an employer-insured person loses a job due to illness and does not have sufficient resources to continue to pay for COBRA health insurance, they also lose their coverage.
Efforts to provide universal health care in the 1960s and early 1990s floundered against widespread opposition by politicians who objected to government control of medicine and business groups which opposed further regulation of the healthcare and insurance industries. Despite a general consensus, codified in the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, that emergency care must be provided even to the indigent, it is not widely accepted in the United States that the availability of broader health care should be considered a right and paid for by public funds.
Read more about this topic: Economic Issues In The United States
Famous quotes containing the words access to, access, health and/or insurance:
“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“Oh, the holiness of always being the injured party. The historically oppressed can find not only sanctity but safety in the state of victimization. When access to a better life has been denied often enough, and successfully enough, one can use the rejection as an excuse to cease all efforts. After all, one reckons, “they” don’t want me, “they” accept their own mediocrity and refuse my best, “they” don’t deserve me.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“It is unconscionable that we ration health care by the ability to pay.... your heart breaks. Health care should be a given.”
—Kathryn Anastos (b. 1950)
“In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, “until death doth part.””
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)