U.S. adults who lose health insurance when they become unemployed are much less likely than insured unemployed people to get either primary care or specialist care.
A team of researchers led by Michelle McEvoy Doty, a vice president at the Commonwealth Fund, New York, has published that finding in an analysis of results from a 2010 telephone survey of 3,033 U.S. adults ages 19 to 64
The researchers found that about 18% of the participants had lost a job within the past two years, and that about 8.3% of the participants had lost employer-sponsored health coverage as a result of becoming unemployed.
When the researchers compared unemployed workers who still had health coverage with unemployed workers who still had health coverage, they found that 56% of the uninsured unemployed reported failing to visit a doctor to check out a medical problem because of concerns about cost, compared with 28% of the insured unemployed.
Similarly, 50% of the uninsured unemployed failed to get specialist care that they felt they needed, compared with 19% of the insured unemployed.
