As more Americans become underinsured or uninsured as a result of rising health insurance premiums and the several changes that were passed in the Big Beautiful Act, the impacts of the rising numbers of the uninsured are likely to be felt by every American. Several healthcare professionals have sounded the alarm on this brewing issue.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2034, about 16 million Americans will be uninsured. One of the factors contributing to people becoming uninsured is the H.R. 1 requirement for people on Medicaid to reconfirm their address and work situation at six-month intervals in order to remain on Medicaid.
Safety net hospitals already operate on tight margins because they serve low-income communities. As funding cuts are implemented, several of these hospitals are likely to be forced to close, and the communities they had been serving will flock to other nearby hospitals. This will lead to overcrowding and extended wait times for every patient.
Another impact of the rising number of the uninsured is that even those who have private insurance could end up paying additional taxes on unrelated products so that those extra taxes fund health care services for the uninsured. An example of this is in Los Angeles where an additional sales tax of 5% has been introduced to help fund health services at the county level. Everyone in the county is going to pay this tax, and that is a direct effect of the growing number of uninsured people.
For those with health insurance, whether employer-sponsored or private, premiums are likely to rise in order to fund the added cost of uninsured people turning up at hospital ERs. The cost of treating patients in the ER is high, and hospitals inevitably end up passing on those costs to the insurance companies covering patients. Already, premiums are projected to rise by 11% next year.
What is more concerning as more people become uninsured is that preventative care and other primary health care routines like checkups will be utilized a lot less. A person who has to pay cash for primary health care is more likely to forego visiting the doctor for that service. As a result, a condition that would have been caught early or managed effectively will progress to a level where the patient has to visit an ER.
For example, colonoscopies cost approximately $2,500. However, colon cancer that has reached stage 4 costs upwards of $130,000 to treat. People who are unable to see their doctor for primary health care due to lacking insurance end up sicker and it costs a lot more to treat those people when they turn up at hospitals. All Americans end up being impacted by this higher cost.
Another example is high blood pressure and diabetes. These conditions can be managed well by primary health care doctors. However, when patients don’t have insurance, they are likely to forgo making the necessary visits to their doctors and will later end up suffering strokes or heart attacks, while diabetics could end up needing amputations or even dialysis after suffering kidney failure.
For entities like Astiva Health that serve vulnerable communities, these effects of underinsurance are probably already giving them plenty to worry about in executing their mission to serve racial minorities in the jurisdictions where they operate.
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