The now months long with no end in sight recession has hit California health insurance particularly hard, according to a recent report from UC Berkeley.
A staggering 500,000 California residents have lost their health insurance coverage since November 2007, the Berkeley designated start date of the recession, reported the San Francisco Gate.
That means 13.5 percent of all the Americans in the country who lost their health insurance during this recession reside in California. In total, 3.7 million Americans lost health coverage in total since the start of the recession.
What’s more, the report estimated that another 600,000 might find themselves uninsured in California alone and 4 million nationwide — and that’s even if the economy fully recovers.
Ouch.
“Unless there’s some sort of policy intervention, we won’t see a real recovery from where we are right now. Given population growth and this ongoing decline in coverage rates, the number of uninsured would actually continue to rise, ” said Ken Jacobs, the report’s co-author and chairman of the Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.