For the uninsured, system needs a cure
Friday, September 29th, 2006
By Chris Fitzsimon
By Leslie Boyd
LBOYD@CITIZEN-TIMES.COM
and Angie Newsome
ANEWSOME@CITIZEN-TIMES.COM
For people without health insurance, an illness or injury can mean having to make a choice between paying the doctor or the grocer.
Increasingly, it’s working people who are forced to choose.
The number of people in North Carolina who have job-based health insurance has fallen steadily in the last five years, according to a study released Thursday.
The report, “Health Insurance Eroding for Working Families,” by economist Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington found that the share of nonelderly North Carolinians with medical insurance provided through their own, their spouse’s or their parent’s job dropped to 61 percent in 2005 from 68 percent in 2000.
“That’s a significant drop,” said John Quinterno research associate with the N.C. Justice Center’s Budget and Tax Center. “There’s been a rapid decrease in the type of jobs that offer health insurance — manufacturing jobs — and those jobs are being replaced with jobs that are much less likely to offer health coverage.”
(Although ranked on top in the region, the number of manufacturing jobs in the area has still dipped by about 5,000 in the past five years, according to data in the U.S. Census 2004 County Business Patterns report.)
Finding care, help
Juan Ramirez, an Edneyville man who supervises a crew of 19 farm workers in Hendersonville, said he goes to the Blue Ridge Community Health Services center — which focuses its care on the uninsured and underinsured — because that’s the place he can find quality care.
He frequently brings crewmembers there for health care, too.
“When they get sick, it’s the first place to come — the only place,” said Ramirez, 49, who’s also on the center’s board of directors.
Blue Ridge Community Health Services CEO John Snow said the number of people like Ramirez who visit the Henderson County center is increasing. More than half of all patients last year were uninsured, he said, a number that increased to 52 percent in 2005 from 45 percent in 2003.
“In our Western North Carolina economy, a lot of jobs are small businesses … or service industry, and access to health care through employers is not that readily available,” Snow agreed. (more…)
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