Maryland workers foot bill for growing uninsured

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Look at last year’s health insurance total on your pay stub and subtract $1,000. That’s how much you would have paid if all Marylanders had health care coverage, according to state officials.

New statistics released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate 15 percent of the nation lacks health coverage. That’s 1 percent higher than the Maryland average, according to state officials.

“It’s shocking and disappointing that the number of uninsured keeps going up. Something needs to be done,” said Vincent DeMarco, president of the Maryland Citizens Health Initiative and Health Care for All Campaign.

A large portion of the state’s 770,000 uninsured could be covered with a portion of the $1-a-pack cigarette tax proposed under the campaign, DeMarco said.

In Maryland, the CDC reported 11.1 percent of the population is uninsured, 20.5 percent rely on public coverage and 75.5 percent are privately insured. Some rely on combinations of public and private coverage.

Local officials say the true numbers of Maryland’s uninsured may be higher, above 14 percent.

More than 80 percent of Maryland’s uninsured live in working families, according to an earlier report by the Maryland Health Care Commission, the state agency responsible for trying to improve coverage.

Commission figures estimate insured families pay an average $1,000 to $1,100 per year in higher hospital bills and health insurance premiums to cover unpaid hospital costs of the uninsured.

According to the commission, the share of private health care coverage has fallen from more than 82 percent of the state in 2003 to about 75 percent.

State-funded Medicaid picked up part of the burden, increasing from 6 percent to more than 9 percent during this time.

Two efforts, to increase Medicaid coverage and to improve options for small companies, did not pass the General Assembly due to budget shortfalls this year, said Ben Steffen, MHCC director of the Center for Information Services and Analysis.

“One of the challenges of state policymakers will be how to fit all of this in” with another significant budget gap expected next year, Steffen said.

A third initiative, to increase coverage of dependents to age 25, passed and will take effect Jan. 1.

More information

The Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics released its “Early Release of Health Insurance Estimates Based on Data From the 2006 National Health Interview Survey.”

The study examines data from interviews in more than 100,000 households nationwide. Highlights include:

» In 2006, 43.6 million Americans said they had no health insurance — 14.8 percent of the population.

» Nearly one in five Americans age 18-64 were uninsured, up 1 percent from 2005.

» About 9.3 percent of children lacked health insurance, down from 13.9 percent in 1997.

» Uninsured rates among the 20 largest states ranged from 7.7 percent in Michigan to 23.8 percent in Texas.

khille@baltimoreexaminer.com

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