The percentage of working-age Americans with moderate to middle incomes who lacked health insurance for at least part of the year rose to 41 percent in 2005, a dramatic increase from the 28 percent in 2001 without coverage, a study released on Wednesday found.
Moreover, more than half of the uninsured adults said they were having problems paying their medical bills or had incurred debt to cover their expenses, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based private, health care policy foundation. The study of 4,350 adults also found that people without insurance were more likely to forgo recommended health screenings such as mammograms than those with coverage, and were less likely to have a regular doctor than their insured counterparts.
. . .
About 45.8 million Americans did not have health insurance in 2004, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
. . .
That study found that cost prevented 41.1 percent of uninsured adults from seeing a doctor, compared to 9.2 percent of individuals with coverage
It’s a mystery to me why the news media makes such a big brouhaha about gas prices on the rise, and virtually ignores rising health care costs. Certainly for many Americans health insurance is a greater liability than gasoline prices. I guess it’s easier throwing together footage of people complaining as they gas up their vehicles than it is to report on something complicated like insurance.