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Financial Burdens of Health Care, 2001 - 2004 |
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From The Commonwealth Fund: Rising health care costs, combined with slowed economic growth, have created greater financial burdens for U.S. families in recent years---and raised the likelihood that they will face problems paying bills, accumulate medical debt, and even forgo needed medical care. In a Commonwealth Fund supported study examining families' financial burdens and out-of-pocket spending between 2001 and 2004, researchers found that by 2004, more than 45 million Americans lived in families with high financial burdens---spending more than 10 percent of their after-tax income on health care. "Financial burdens have increased to the point at which private insurance is no longer able to provide financial protection for an increasing number of families," say the authors. In the first part of this decade, with health care costs continuing to grow faster than inflation, employers shifted more of their expenses to workers through higher premiums, deductibles, and copayments. At the same time, families faced economic pressures because of slower income growth, which resulted in increased poverty rates and a swelling of the ranks of the uninsured. Between 2001 and 2004, the percentage of the nonelderly population living in families with high out-of-pocket health care burdens rose from 16 percent to 18 percent. After adjusting for inflation, total out-of-pocket spending rose by $373, from $2,283 to $2,656, a 16 percent increase over the three-year period. The uninsured and those with public coverage did not see their financial burdens change between 2001 and 2004. Financial burdens were highest among poor and low-income people with private insurance. Fifty-four percent of poor and 37 percent of low-income people with private insurance faced high financial burdens in 2004.
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