WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 (UPI) -- The number of people without health insurance rose by 1.4 million to 41.2 million between 2000 and 2001, but at the same time the number of insured rose by 1.2 million, to 241 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Meanwhile, an estimated 14.6 percent of the population had no health insurance coverage during all of 2001, up from 14.2 percent in 2000.
"The increase of uninsured is probably due to an increase in population as well as an increase in the unemployed," Robert Mills, author of Health Insurance Coverage: 2001, told United Press International. "The data came from surveying 78,000 households nationwide to see if they had health insurance during anytime of 2001."
According to Mills, 16 percent of males, including children, and 14 percent of females, including children, of the 282 million people living in the United States in 2001 did not have health insurance during 2001.
Other report highlights include:
-- The number and percentage of people covered by government health insurance programs rose significantly between 2000 and 2001. This resulted largely from an increase from 29.5 million to 31.6 million people covered by Medicaid.
-- Based on three-year averages, the proportion of people without health insurance ranged from around 7.2 percent in Rhode Island and Minnesota to around 23.2 percent in New Mexico and Texas.
-- Compared with 2000, the proportion of people who had employment-based policies in their own name fell for workers employed by firms with fewer than 25 employees, but was unchanged for those employed by larger firms.
-- Young adults, 18 to 24 years old, remained the least likely of any age group to have health insurance in 2001.
However, Stuart Schear, of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, most of the people who do not have health insurance are in their 30s, 40s and 50s, working in jobs with modest wages in which their employer does not offer benefits, including health insurance.
"As the cost of health insurance has gone up, more companies are having employees share a larger percentage of the health insurance cost and some workers may not be able to afford the increase," Schear told UPI. "These workers earn too much to qualify for public health programs and they don't earn enough to pay for their own health insurance policy."
According to the Department of Labor, only 24 percent of small businesses that employ low-wage workers offer health benefits, compared to 88 percent of their large business counterparts.
Former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter have pledged their support to a national initiative to focus attention on the tens of millions of Americans who lack health insurance.
Ford and Carter will serve as honorary co-chairs of "Cover the Uninsured Week," which is being organized by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a diverse group of national organizations including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO, the Business Roundtable and Service Employees International Union.
The weeklong series of events will be held from March 10 to March 16 in communities from coast to coast.
"Both former presidents have a strong commitment to this issue and both would like to see it be resolved," Schear said. "Not having health insurance is a leading cause of personal bankruptcy and hospital emergency rooms and other health facilities are often overwhelmed by the number of uninsured patients.
"In addition, people without health insurance delay needed health care, live with illness and die younger."
Mills said that the report's survey did not ask the households if they were legal or illegal immigrants or if those without health insurance were independent contractors.
After the downsizing of the 1990s, many companies laid off employees and rehired them as independent contractors often at similar salaries but without benefits, according to Paul Fronstin, of the Employee Benefits Research Institute, a non-partisan research group in Washington.
"There is not a lot of hard data on independent contractors, but we estimate it could be about 5 (million) to 6 million workers who are uninsured who cannot afford to pay for a single health insurance policy which is the most expensive available, because it doesn't benefit from the group discounts companies get," he told UPI.
"There is nothing stopping companies in allowing its independent contractors from paying for the group rate plan themselves to be insured, but they have already decided not to allow some employees to receive benefits."
According to Fronstin, there is no easy solution to having the uninsured covered because anything will cost a lot of money.
"Many do not want to expand government by allowing more to use Medicaid or allowing workers to buy into Medicaid themselves and some companies say they cannot afford the ever-increasing cost of health insurance," he said.
