With President Obama scheduled on Wednesday, September 9 to make what's being billed as a major address regarding health care, the evening prior seemed like a good time to check in with a recent comprehensive report from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
The Center's director, E. Richard Brown, was health policy advisor to the then-presidential candidate Obama. Brown is the lead author of the new report, "The State of Health Insurance in California: Findings from the 2007 California Health Interview Survey."
A free download of the report is available here.
The report culls and analyzes data from the Center's extraordinary CHIS project. Past TTLA references are here.
The report notes that at some point during 2007 -- the most recent year CHIS data is accessible -- about 1/5 of non-senior citizen Californians lacked health insurance. About 1/10 of California's children lacked the same. (Seniors are covered by universal state and federal programs.)
The report's "Conclusions and Policy Issues" section of its Executive Summary -- which is nine pages long -- reads in part:
"Reforms in the employment-based market must be particularly sensitive to the income disparity that prevails and that has probably worsened with a weak economy. Expansions in public coverage can guarantee a safety net for low-income adults, and policy changes in the privately purchased market may improve affordability of this type of coverage.
"Policies that aim to expand coverage through privately purchased insurance require significant insurance market reforms. Such reforms should require health plans to accept applicants regardless of medical condition and limit the ability of plans to charge more based on health conditions. Significant subsidies are also needed to make health insurance affordable to low- and moderate-income persons."
A UCLA press release about the report leads with news that 2.2 Californians carry medical-related debt -- with nearly 2/3 of those people possessing insurance. A closer reading of the report shows that 80% of the medical debts are less than $4,000.
The 102-page report contains a wealth of other findings, as well as the usual complement of charts and graphs as well as what would appear to be stock photography.
Again, full report is here.
And related: RAND's Health Care Matrix
Photo Credit: The image accompanying this post was taken by Flickr user California Bear. It was used under Creative Commons license.
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How odd that the prices of those most basic necessities in our lives (housing, medical care) seem to run opposite of what market principles would dictate? Average consumer commodities have steadily decreased in price throughout history, but those thing Americans need most have become harder and harder to obtain.