Access to health insurance
- Main article: Health care in the United States
The United States does not have a national health care or system of socialized medicine, although programs such as Medicare and Medicaid provide basic health insurance to elderly, disabled, and poor residents. For most US residents, health insurance is provided as an employee benefit, leaving unemployed and part-time workers to pay for their own insurance (Americans are basically forced to have full-time work in this sense). As of 2001, 41.2 million people in the United States (14.6% of the US population), including 8.5 million children, had no health insurance coverage. By 2004, this had risen to 45 million (15.6%). The US Census Bureau attributed the drop primarily to the loss of employer-provided plans due to the economic downturn and a continuation of rising costs. 2 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 lost their health insurance by the time they declared bankruptcy 3. In the U.S. employer plans can be continued through COBRA at a rate that is usually double the rate the employee paid while employed. When an employer-insured person loses his or her job due to illness and does not have sufficient resources to continue to pay for their COBRA health insurance, they also lose their coverage. Efforts to provide universal health care in the 1960s and early 1990s floundered against widespread opposition, particularly by more conservative politicians who objected to government control of medicine and business groups which did not want to experience a loss of profits with the increase of government bureaucracy in the healthcare and insurance industries. Despite a general agreement, enforced in law, that emergency care must be provided even to the indigent, there is no consensus in the United States that the availability of broader health care should be considered a right, nor that this service should be paid for by the state. [1]
