As Connecticut officials try to comply with the Affordable Care Act and provide health coverage to the uninsured, they have a big question to answer: Just who are the state's uninsured? Jeff Cohen has this report.
Connecticut has over 300,000 people without health insurance. Of them, more than 200,000 are adults who will be able to buy insurance from the state's new online marketplace -- called an exchange -- come 2014. These are adults who aren't poor enough for Medicaid and who don't have insurance of their own.
Now let's break that number down a bit. Of the 200,000 adults without health insurance, about a third of them make between $46,000 and $70,000 a year for a family of four. They'll qualify for federal subsides that will help them buy insurance.
But here's where it could get tricky -- another third of those uninsured adults, about 57,000 people in the state, they make over $92,000 a year for a family of four. And they won't qualify for subsidies.
"The fundamental reason the don't have insurance, is due -- not because they don't want it -- it's due to affordability."
That's Kevin Counihan. He's the CEO of the Connecticut Health Insurance Exchange. And he says that while $90,000 may sound like a comfortable number, it isn't.
"Let's say for the family of four that those insurance premiums are $1,200. You take that $90,000, right, and you take out taxes, mortgage, all that stuff -- food, clothes -- and that $1,200? That's a pretty big number."
So what happens to these people -- those of us who don't make that much money but who make too much for health insurance subsidy? That's a riddle for Counihan to figure out before the exchange goes online in January 2014.
For WNPR, I'm Jeff Cohen.
