Employer-Provided Health Care Coverage Falls for Seventh Year

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/10/10/employer-provided-health-care-coverage-falls-for-seventh-year/

by Mike Hall, Oct 10, 2008

For the seventh year in a row, the number of people in the United States who receive their health care coverage through employer-provided plans declined.

With the nation’s economic outlook growing increasingly bleak, those numbers are likely to slide even further, says Economic Policy Institute (EPI) economist Elise Gould:

The health care problem has reached a critical level. Bold new solutions need to be considered to address the growing crisis.

A new EPI report authored by Gould, The Erosion of Employer Sponsored Health Insurance, shows that since 2000 the percentage of U.S. workers with employer-sponsored insurance dropped form 68.3 percent to 62.9 percent. There were 4.1 million more uninsured workers in 2007 than in 2000.

The report says:

Uninsured workers are disproportionately young, non-white, less educated and low wage; however, workers across the socio-economic spectrum experienced losses in coverage over the 2000–07 period. Even the most highly educated and highest wage workers had lower rates of insurance coverage in 2007 than in 2000.

Under Sen. John McCain’s health care tax proposal, millions more workers could lose their employer-provided coverage. Newsweek economics correspondent Jane Bryant Quinn writes that if McCain’s health care plan was put into effect, it would drop 20 million people from employer coverage and throw them into the shark tank of the private insurance world, and “will raise your costs without changing the game.”

FULL story at link.

http://www.actblue.com/page/aflcio60?refcode=1010jjs

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