The New Face Of The Uninsured: Middle Class
Olympia, WA June 15, 2009 11:01 a.m.
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DiscussAs more-and-more people lose their jobs, the new face of the uninsured has become middle-income Americans. Correspondent Austin Jenkins profiles a Northwest woman who’s out-of-work and uninsured.
Receptionist: “Good morning HealthPoint this is Carlyn may I help you?”
At the HealthPoint Dental Clinic in Redmond, Washington DeBorah Llavanes sits in the waiting room. She’s here to get a couple of cavities filled. She discovered HealthPoint last winter when she got seriously ill.
DeBorah Llavanes: I am at HealthPoint because I do not have insurance coverage and HealthPoint provides a sliding scale where based on your income you pay accordingly.”
At age 53, for the first time in her adult life, Llavanes is uninsured.
DeBorah Llavanes: “I would have never thought that I would not have coverage.”
A mortgage loan officer, she went from making as much as 7-thousand dollars a month during the height of the real estate boom to essentially being unemployed today. She calls herself the new face of the uninsured.
It’s time for Llavanes appointment. Soon she’s in the dental chair.
Dentist: “You do have some filings on the bottom to get done. I’m curious is either side hurting – right or left?”
While Llavanes gets her cavities filled, I go next door to HealthPoint’s medical clinic to meet Dr. Kim McDermott.
Dr. Kimberly McDermott: “I am a pediatrician and I have worked here for almost 15 years.”
Dr. McDermott says never in her career has she seen such a demand from people like DeBorah Llavanes for the sliding-fee medical care her clinic provides.
Dr. Kimberly McDermott: “More patients who I would consider middle class are coming and we didn’t used to see that. We were more a safety net for the poorest families in our state. But lately I’ve seen more and more patients who had insurance and have lost it - so a different demographic of patient than we used to see.”
In fact over the past year, HealthPoint reports a 27-percent jump in requests for appointments at its seven community health clinics in the Puget Sound region. Harder to come by are up-to-date statistics on the rising number of people without health insurance here in the Northwest.
Unlike unemployment numbers, which come out monthly, statistics on the uninsured usually lag almost two years behind. Officials in Oregon and Idaho won’t even guesstimate the current numbers.
But in Washington the Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler estimates by the end of this year 875,000 Washingtonians will be uninsured - a 21-percent jump over last year. Now some of those people are showing up in emergency room.
Johnese Spisso, Harborview/UW Medicine: “We began seeing our first changes as early as October and November of this past year.”
Johnese Spisso is with University of Washington Medicine. That includes Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center – a regional trauma center that serves four states. She says the UW system is seeing a two to three percent increase in the number of uninsured or charity care cases it sees.
That may not sound like much, but when you consider the UW serves more than a million patients a year – the numbers quickly add up. Spisso says there’s also another trend that’s emerging.
Johnese Spisso: “One of the things we have seen is people delaying more of what we sometimes in the healthcare industry call ‘elective surgery’ and it’s really not elective, it’s scheduled surgeries. So things they need to have done that are not a crisis, we’re seeing people delaying that if they’ve lost their insurance.”
There is help for people who lose their jobs and want to keep health coverage. Earlier this year, the federal government created a subsidy to help laid-off workers continue their insurance. There’s also a lot of talk in Washington, D.C. these days that healthcare reform could be around the corner.
Ron Pollack heads Families USA, a leading healthcare watchdog and was a key player in healthcare reform efforts during the Clinton era.
Ron Pollack, Families USA: “I think we’ve got our best shot ever and with costs going up, more and more people joining the ranks of the uninsured, I think there’s a perception that this is a crisis that we have to address. The cost of doing nothing is extraordinarily expensive for businesses, for families and for the government.”
Back at the HealthPoint Dental Clinic, DeBorah Llavanes stops at the billing desk after her appointment.
Clinic Worker: “I know that you don’t have any insurance, can you make a payment for today’s visit?
DeBorah Llavanes: “Can I pay like twenty dollars today?”
Clinic Worker: “Sure not a problem.”
Even with a fifty percent sliding scale discount, Llavanes will eventually have to pay nearly two hundred dollars and she still needs more fillings. Before she heads home, I ask her what it’s like to lose health insurance.
DeBorah Llavanes: “Stressful. I think it’s something that when you have it and have had it for a lifetime you don’t really think about the benefits of healthcare until you need it.”
Reporter: “Or until you don’t have it.”
DeBorah Llavanes: “Exactly and it makes a huge difference.”
Llavanes is currently looking for work and she says even more important than salary is whether the job comes with healthcare.
© 2009 KUOW
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