The number of Colorado residents without health insurance edged up to 767,000 people last year, or 17.1 percent of the state population, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday.
Colorado continued to have a higher percentage of uninsured residents than the national average, which remained almost unchanged at 15.7 percent, representing a total of 45.8 million uninsured Americans between 2003 and 2004.
The numbers are a reflection of a mainly jobless economic recovery that is still dogged by sluggish markets, health industry experts said.
“In Colorado, we’re just not cutting it. We’re not even coming close,” said Dr. Gary VanderArk, a Denver neurosurgeon and president of the Colorado Coalition for the Medically Underserved.
An additional 21,000 Colorado residents went without health insurance last year, a half percentage-point increase in the uninsured rate. Western and Southern states had the highest percentages of uninsured residents, the Census Bureau said.
VanderArk said he hoped Colorado legislators will be able to add more adults to the state’s Medicaid program with funds from the tobacco tax approved by voters last fall. trim here if need:One state proposal would add 6,000 parents of low- income children already covered under the program, he said.
Denver-area health facilities treating the poor, such as the 13cq Metro Community Provider Networkcq clinics, are consistently overwhelmed with uninsured patients, many of them women and children, said Dr. Barry Martin, the network’s medical director.
The primary-care clinics also have seen an influx of uninsured patients discharged from area hospitals but unable to afford follow-up care with private doctors, Martin said.
“One of the things we continue to see with the uninsured is lack of access to specialty care,” Martin said.
The percentage of uninsured Americans remained unchanged because a decline in employer- sponsored health insurance was offset by higher enrollment in government health programs, primarily Medicaid, the Census Bureau said.
Despite the concerns voiced by some doctors and patient advocates, medical economist J.D. Kleinke said the recently released numbers do not signal a health care crisis.
“It means more of the same. It’s business as usual in the health care system,” said Kleinke, executive director of the Portland, Ore.-based Omnimedix Institute, a nonpartisan health care research firm.
About half of the nation’s 45.8 million uninsured are adults between jobs or young, healthy people just out of college, according to Kleinke.
Only about 15 million are what Kleinke calls the “hard-core uninsured” – workers in low-paying jobs who can’t afford insurance and are likely to develop chronic medical conditions making it impossible to buy insurance.
“Forty-five million uninsured does not mean 45 million people bleeding in the street,” he said.
The Census Bureau also found that:
Hispanics were the only ethnic group to see a rise in the number of uninsured in 2004. The number of uninsured Hispanics increased last year to 13.7 million from 13.2 million in 2003.
Most of the uninsured belong to families and worked either full or part time during the year.
Two-thirds of the nation’s 45 million uninsured had household incomes below $50,000.
The two age groups with the highest number of uninsured persons were age 25 to 34 and age 45 to 64.
Staff writer Marsha Austin can be reached at 303-820-1242 or maustin@denverpost.com.
