Number of uninsured may jump to 50 million

"The number of people in the U.S. lacking health insurance may have grown as much as 9 percent to 50 million people last year, adding fuel to President Barack Obama's push for overhauling the system," Bloomberg reports. "The likely increase was driven by a jump in U.S. unemployment, said Ana Gupte, a Sanford Bernstein & Co. Inc. analyst in New York who follows UnitedHealth Group Inc. and WellPoint Inc., the top two U.S. health insurers. The Census Bureau releases the annual figures tomorrow. The number of uninsured slipped to 46 million in 2007 from 47 million."

"Unemployment surged to a quarter-century high of 9.7 percent in August, according to Labor Department statistics released last week." But the economic stimulus package "may blunt the impact of job losses because it included $24.7 billion to reduce health-care costs for the growing number of unemployed, said Les Funtleyder, a health-industry analyst at Miller Tabak & Co. in New York." The stimulus also gave an additional $87 billion to states for Medicaid. Mary Kahn, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, " "said average Medicaid enrollment probably expanded 1.8 percent from 2007 to 2008" (Gaouette, 9/9).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.