A new report shows that between 2001 and 2006 a growing number of Americans faced a high financial burden from healthcare expenses.
“The Growing Financial Burden Of Healthcare: National And State Trends, 2001-2006,” by Peter J. Cunningham, of the Center for Studying Health System Change in Washington, shows that almost one in five non-elderly Americans lived in families spending more than 10 percent of before-tax income on healthcare in 2006, up from one in seven Americans (14.4 percent) in 2001.
The study found that throughout the time period the percentage of Americans with high financial burden increased, on average, by about 1 percent per year. There was also substantial variation in high financial burden among insured persons across states – ranging from a low of 12.4 percent in California to a high of 26.4 percent in Alabama for the period 2004 to 2006 – and that the middle- and higher-income people with private insurance experienced the largest increases in financial burden.
Cunningham proposes that the economic factors of the last two years are likely to have both increased the number of people lacking medical insurance and decreased access to and affordability of private insurance coverage.
"To stop and reverse the ongoing increase in the number of families with high healthcare cost burden, strong economic growth must be accompanied by both increases in family incomes – which have been rare during this decade – and more moderate increases in healthcare costs,” he said.
Health reform legislation "has the potential to reduce the state variation in high financial burden among the uninsured population," said Cunningham. This is significant because "states with both high un-insurance rates and high financial burdens among the insured should be a concern for both state and national policy makers, as prior research has shown that high un-insurance rates in an area can have detrimental spillover effects."
In the study, funded by The Commonwealth Fund, Cunningham analyzed data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys (MEPS). Sample sizes of about 28,000 people aged 65 and younger are included for each of the survey years.