•Press Release Workers
April 2004
For Immediate Release: May 10, 2004
Contact: Debi Kar, 202-387-5080
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) has released a series of data briefs looking at access to health insurance in the US as Cover the Uninsured Week gets under way this week.
Health insurance coverage has fallen from the economic peak in 1999 through the recovery in 2002, with nearly 70 million Americans lacking coverage at some point in 2002.
Dependents (both children and adults) living with someone with employer-provided health insurance are now less likely to be on that employer plan than they were a few years ago. Children, in particular are increasingly not on an employer-based plan — even if their parents remain on such a plan. Many children of workers on employer-based health plans have switched to Medicaid or no coverage at all.
This in-depth analysis of access to health insurance by Heather Boushey, Joseph Wright, and Marya Murray Diaz, has found that lack of coverage is due to a number of factors, the most important being cutbacks in employer-provided health insurance. This has resulted in unequal access to health insurance. Policy responses to declining coverage have so far been inadequate.
The full set of briefs, click here.
The data used in this analysis is from CEPR's analysis of the Survey of Income and Program Participation. CEPR creates user-friendly Data Sets from this survey and makes the data and programs available to other researchers via ceprDATA.org.
This project was funded by a generous grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
