It's "Cover the Uninsured Week" according to the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the
state-by-state breakdown has just been released over the AP wire (which I stumbled across reading
The Guardian).
Read on for highlights...
Perhaps the most shocking piece of information: only two states, Minnesota and Hawaii, have the percentage of uninsured adults in the single digits. Congratulations, Minnesotans! You still have some of that Progressive Era mojo!
The highest rates of uninsured adults? Shockingly, Texas, with 30.7% of all adults and 26.6% of working adults with lacking insurance.
In my neck of the woods, we have an embarrassingly high 22.3% uninsured (19.1% uninsured and working) here in Oregon. Thank you very much Republicans for your hard work in convincing the public that they didn't really need to vote for taxes that would fund and maintain services like the Oregon Health Plan.
These numbers are awful, but not surprising. Health care administration costs are exploding, growing 3 times more than that of physician costs. A full 25% of all health care costs go to administrative expenses, and health care administration is the fastest growing sector of the health care industry. $10 billion dollars is spent annually on marketing. The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other country, but we have the highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world. I got most of these numbers (the ones without links) from Howard Waitzkin's book At The Front Lines of Medicine, which I highly recommend for those interested in the current state of health care in the United States.
The numbers of the uninsured and the costs related to health care administration underscore some important items. First, the vast majority of adults who are uninsured are working adults. Presumably, these folks are in lines of work that don't pay so handsomely either, and are unable to afford the high costs to receive medical treatment. By deferring preventive medical treatments, the uninsured crowd our emergency rooms - problems that could have been treated with little cost if regular medical visits had occurred become acute. The costs of these ER visits, which, of course, the uninsured cannot afford, are passed on to society. Even the WaPo recognizes that the failing health care system in the United States is a more pressing concern than Social Security deform.
Second, the facts about the explosion of administrative costs in corporate health care (where "Dr." Frist made his millions) make the "massive and costly new bureaucracy of socialized medicine" arguments that conservatives offer up seem completely off-kilter. Other industrialized nations with national health care systems have a fraction of the administrative costs (Waitzkin again).
This situation is intolerable. It's "Cover the Uninsured Week." Holler and scream at those in power to actually do something about the declining health of our citizenry.