Census report confirms many Nevadans lack health insurance

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005 | 9:37 a.m.

Steven Hansen, chief executive of Nevada Health Centers Inc., a nonprofit organization with clinics for low-income patients across Nevada, didn't need Tuesday's Census Bureau report to tell him that the state has high numbers of people without health insurance.

He sees it every day.

About 60 percent of the nearly 5,000 patients who visited his organization's nine Clark County clinics had no insurance in the quarter ending July 31 -- and that was 5 percent higher than the three months before, Hansen said.

No, Hansen and other experts weren't surprised to see that Nevada ranked fourth nationwide with 19.1 percent of its residents lacking health insurance -- but they were lacking consensus on why, and what could be done about the problem.

The figure is particularly perplexing given that Nevada seems to be relatively prosperous, as Tuesday's report also indicated, showing comparatively high levels of median household income for the 2002-2004 period.

The report shows the median household income at $46,984, above the national rate of $44,473. It also reveals low levels of poverty -- 10.2 percent, below the national rate of 12.7 percent.

"It does seem to be out of sync," said Keith Schwer, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at UNLV.

As a possible explanation, Schwer offered up the state's most widely-known trait -- rapid growth.

"If you get a lot of people moving in picking up jobs, they're still in a grace period without insurance," he said.

Assembly Majority Leader Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, said the issue of high numbers of Nevadans without health insurance is not new.

"For the last several years, year after year, we've been on the bottom of the list," Buckley said.

She led a subcommittee before the recently-concluded legislative session that looked at the problem.

"We saw that the highest numbers of people without insurance were working, but either they or their employers couldn't afford insurance."

She said industries such as construction and some restaurants had larger numbers of workers without insurance.

Also, she said, the state's large and growing Hispanic population -- now at nearly 23 percent, according to recent census estimates -- is more likely to be uninsured because many immigrants work part-time jobs.

Tuesday's report had no state-level figures on Hispanics but indicated that 32.7 percent of Hispanics nationwide lacked insurance in 2004.

Buckley and her subcommittee helped push a bill through the session aimed at giving more coverage to pregnant women and employees of small businesses.

The bill creates a program based on matching federal with county dollars that is scheduled to begin in October.

Buckley said she hopes the program results in about 10,000 more people obtaining coverage in the next couple of years.

"But this is not the solution, only a step forward," she said.

The lawmaker said she thinks the issue is also "bigger than Nevada."

The federal government, she said, could help encourage innovative projects like having employers pool together to offer insurance to part-time workers.

It could also take a stand against the pharmaceutical industry and rising prices of medicine, part of the built-in cost of health insurance, she said.

Meanwhile, Hansen, the director of Nevada Health Centers, said his organization is scheduled to open a new clinic in downtown Las Vegas in early 2006 -- the 10th valleywide.

His organization, and the number of patients it has seen, has grown about 20 percent a year for the last five years, he said.

"We plan to continue our growth as the need continues to grow."