Access to health insurance

Access to health insurance

The United States does not have a national health care or socialized medicine system, although programs such as Medicare and Medicaid provide basic health insurance to elderly and poor residents. For most US residents, health insurance is provided as an employee benefit, leaving unemployed and part-time workers to pay for their own insurance. As of 2001, 41.2 million people in the United States (14.6% of the US population), including 8.5 million children, had no health insurance coverage. Efforts to provide universal health care in the 1960s and early 1990s foundered against widespread opposition, particularly by conservatives who objected to government control of medicine and business groups who did not want to experience a loss of profits with the increase of government bureaucracy in the health care and insurance industries. Despite a general agreement, enforced in law, that emergency care must be provided even to the indigent, there is no consensus in the United States that the availability of broader health care should be considered a right, nor that this service should be paid for by the state.