Editorial: The plight of the uninsured

Saturday, Dec. 3, 2005 | 8:15 a.m.

It is easy to turn your attention elsewhere when reading raw statistics about individuals who lack health insurance coverage. Your attention would last much longer, however, if you were to visit the emergency room of any public hospital or the waiting area of any government health clinic. There you would see the flesh-and-blood consequences of our broken health insurance system -- hundreds of children and adults enduring long waits for care paid by the taxpayers.

Advice columnists always say that you must acknowledge a problem before you can solve it. That being true, there is plenty of information about the lack of health insurance to understand the scope of the problem.

Updated census figures released in August showed that about 450,000 people in Nevada, and about 46 million people nationwide, lack health insurance. Only the states of Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma fared worse than Nevada in the percentage of uninsured.

And this week the Iowa Policy Project, a nonprofit research group, released the results of a national study whose findings were based on 2001 census figures and nationwide telephone surveys conducted during the years 2003 and 2004. The study found that four out of every five part-time workers lack employer-sponsored health coverage. About 25 percent of the nation's workers are part-timers.

The study recommended changing federal labor laws to make part-time workers as eligible for employer-sponsored health insurance as are full-time workers. In contrast, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called upon private insurers to provide a solution.

Unfortunately, health-coverage statistics just keep getting worse every year, with neither the private nor public sectors doing much about it. There is a glaring need for a fix and surely there is a way to put one in place. All that's lacking is the will.