The coronavirus pandemic has revealed many flaws in the U.S. healthcare system, first and foremost the nation’s patchwork public health infrastructure and health inequities in mortality rates due to COVID-19.
The Commonwealth Fund‘s biennial report, published as the pandemic continues into and beyond the third quarter of 2020, sheds light on another weakness in U.S. healthcare: the cost of health insurance relative to working Americans’ relatively flat incomes.
I explored the details of this study in a post titled Health Insurance Affordability: A Call-to-Action for Healthcare Industry Stakeholders in the Pandemic, published on the Medecision Liberation blog site.
The survey commenced in January 2020, and extended into June — at the height of the pandemic — so took into account many working Americans’ experiences with their employer-based insurance plans in the crisis.
Among the key findings from Commonwealth Fund were the facts that:
More people of color were uninsured in the past year than whites- More lower-income workers were uninsured in the past year than higher-income earners
- More young people age 18-34 were uninsured compared with people over 50
- Even with health insurance, people avoid or delay getting necessary health care and prescription drugs,
among other insights.
Check out the full analysis on the Medecision website to learn more about the state of health insurance in America in and beyond 2020.
And remember….having access to health care is a social determinant of health, contributing to the nation’s wellness and the public’s health.