Forty-nine percent of people overall, and 43 percent of people with insurance said they were "somewhat" to "completely" unprepared to cope with a costly medical emergency over the coming year. Some 16 percent of the people surveyed had no health plan at all, including many working respondents whose jobs didn't offer insurance or who couldn't afford the premiums of deductibles of the available plan.
When added to the population of "uninsured" - approximately 16% of the population - a total of 40% of Americans ages 18-64 have, at best, inadequate access to health care. The report, published in the September issue, also finds that most employers are struggling to keep up while the insurance behemoths prosper from the misery.
In the first of a series of reports on America's health care crisis, Consumer Reports paints a profile of the "underinsured," explains what it means to be insured but not adequately covered, and tells of the costs and consequences for everyone, including people who are currently "well insured." The report is based on a survey conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center in May 2007, which sampled 2,905 Americans between ages 18 and 64. The survey found evidence of increasing frailty in the U.S. system of health insurance on almost all fronts.
C'mon, Consumer Reports! Stop complaining about health care. And don't look to government for a solution. Because our government is run by people who don't believe in it, yet who enjoy taxpayer funded premiere health care plan at our expense.
The senator spoke of the upcoming presidential election and the desire of many "liberal Democrats" to socialize medicine and have the government take over health care. Sununu cautioned against having the government involved in running the health care system.
Steve Marchand, whose briefly uninsured parents were faced with an $80,000 medical bill due to an unexpected crisis (a horror story which drew gasps at the campaign event I attended in Hanover), is not amused. From a new press release:
Touting "the principles, the philosophies, [and] the beliefs" he shares with Bush, Sununu called for more of the Bush agenda in 2008.
"The Sununu-Bush agenda has produced the war in Iraq, a record national debt, and millions more uninsured Americans," said U.S. Senate candidate, Portsmouth Mayor Steve Marchand. "Americans don't want more of the same. We can't afford more of the same."
