Close to 1 million Marylanders have no health insurance, and it could be costing you.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated the cost of having so many people slip through the cracks in the health care system at $1.47 billion a year.
“Those costs are being passed on” in several ways, said Hugh Waters, a health economist at Hopkins. “One way was to the taxpayers ? state and federal. The other way is through health insurance premiums.”
Of the $1.47 billion, $438 million came from the pockets of the uninsured individuals, according to the study. Doctors, insurance companies, their clients and charities paid the balance. Public health programs accounted for $462 million of this amount, and hospitals reported $227 as write-offs and bad debt.
Studies show it is more expensive to have so many people uninsured than it is to provide free preventive care or mandatory insurance, Waters said. “There?s no question.”
As many as 810,000 Marylanders have no health care and another 800,000 have poor health care coverage, according to the Maryland Health Care for All Coalition.
Each of those individuals contributes $2,371 to the tab calculated by the Hopkins researchers. Their results were published Tuesday in the February edition of the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved.
“Our resultshighlight the important implications for policies to expand insurance coverage,” Waters said. “Many of the costs of medical services that would be consumed by those newly insured under an expansion are already paid for, either by the uninsured themselves or by others.”
There are also hidden costs to those uninsured in terms of decreased health status and increased uncertainty, according to the study.
The study was completed under a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration and in conjunction with the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
