Roughly 15
percent of Americans are uninsured at any one time, although up to 25 percent are uninsured for at least
fourth months in a four year period. The past week has been designated by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as "Cover the Uninsured Week". RWJ has been promoting this campaign for several years and two sets of facts have clearly emerged. The first set of facts is that the healthcare "system" provides fewer services to the uninsured, and they struggle financially with the cost of the limited care they do receive, resulting in worse health and financial outcomes than for those with insurance. Meanwhile, the employer-provided health insurance system is broken, and neither the individual market nor Medicaid can pick up the slack, leaving the uninsured and their safety-net providers in an ongoing perpetual crisis.
The second set of facts is that, in effect, politically we don't care. Attempts to get Wal-Mart and other employers to insure their workers is a futile attempt to paper over the cracks, and no politician dares take on the fundamentally broken nature of the health insurance system. So this will be an issue that America will only fix when it hits a complete cataclysm. And that process will not be pleasant. - Matthew