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Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Health Insurance Hurt By Recession in California

By Ethan Kalvin

The long lasting current recession is having a large impact on Californians and their health insurance reports UC Berkeley researchers. Some impact is due to employers cutting benefits, but the biggest impact is due to people losing their jobs. A health insurance benefit is pricey even if an employee is helping pay part of it.

There have been 500,000 California residents who've lost their health insurance since November 2007. This reflects the recession start date according to the Berkeley report, reported by the San Francisco Gate. Employers offering health insurance have declined in number since 2000.

Many American people have seen their health insurance benefit disappear since the recession began, the people of California constitute 13.5 percent of the total. Across the country 3.7 million people have been affected. Berkeley researchers think their report numbers are conservative.

The report notes a additional sour future trend of less health insurance coverage due to the rising expense of health premiums and lower numbers of employers offering benefits. If the economy regains it's stride and starts to grow again there will still be an estimated 600,000 additional Californians and 4 million overall that will lose their insurance coverage.

Policy interventions excluded, the recovery will not happen from this point forward. The population explosion along with this continual decline of numbers of people with insurance coverage, uninsured persons total will increase according to Ken Jacobs, co-author of the report and Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education Chairman.

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