Uninsured Foreigners

by digby

I realize that California is a foreign land and is so awful that everyone in it deserves to suffer, but this is pretty bad:

Nearly 1 in 4 Californians under age 65 had no health insurance last year, according to a new report, as soaring unemployment propelled vast numbers of once-covered workers into the ranks of the uninsured.

The state’s uninsured population jumped to 8.2 million in 2009, up from 6.4 million in 2007, marking the highest number over the last decade, investigators from UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research said.

As it turns out this is actually worse that it sounds:

Among those over age 18, nearly 1 in 3 had no insurance for all or part of 2009, the UCLA researchers found. The ranks of uninsured children also grew. The study was based on phone interviews from 2007, updated with current insurance enrollment data.

Most of them are on the Republican Plan (“don’t get sick and if you do get sick, die quickly”) which is good. Otherwise, this could get really expensive as these folks end up in the emergency rooms and wind up going bankrupt.

But hey, it’s only 8.2 million people, which the wingnuts keep telling us is a drop in the bucket. And many of them are lolling around living it up on the $300 a week they make on unemployment. Once those lazy duffers get off their butts, we’ll be back to only 6 or 7 million uninsured.

So this isn’t really a problem at all… never mind.