Without Health Benefits, a Good Life Turns Fragile

[RedEarth]

SALISBURY, N.C. — Vicki H. Readling vividly remembers the start of 2006.
“Everybody was saying, ‘Happy new year,’ ” Ms. Readling recalled. “But I remember going straight to bed and lying down scared to death because I knew that at that very minute, after midnight, I was without insurance. I was kissing away a bad year of cancer. But I was getting ready to open up to a door of hell.”

Ms. Readling, a 50-year-old real estate agent, is one of nearly 47 million people in America with no health insurance.

Increasingly, the problem affects middle-class people like Ms. Readling, who said she made about $60,000 last year. As an independent contractor, like many real estate agents, Ms. Readling does not receive health benefits from an employer. She tried to buy a policy in the individual insurance market, but — having had cancer — could not obtain coverage, except at a price exceeding $27,000 a year, which was more than she could pay.

“I don’t know which was worse, being told that I had cancer or finding that I could not get insurance,” Ms. Readling (pronounced RED-ling) said in an interview in her office, near the tree-lined streets and stately old homes of this city in the Piedmont region of North Carolina.

It is well known that the ranks of the uninsured have been swelling; federal figures show an increase of 6.8 million since 2000. But the surprise is that the uninsured are not necessarily the poor, the unemployed and the undocumented. Solidly middle-class people like Ms. Readling are one of the fastest growing subgroups.

Today, more than one-third of the uninsured — 17 million of the nearly 47 million — have family incomes of $40,000 or more, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonpartisan organization. More than two-thirds of the uninsured are in households with at least one full-time worker.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/us/05uninsured.html?ei=5065&en=136217ab20e1b06a&ex=1173762000&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print

[Mojorabbit]

1. My husband was turned down again today by aarp's

group health insurance.He is a physician who had a heart attack seven years ago and otherwise is healthy as a horse. No one will insure him at any price. It worries me sick. My dad's hospital bill was 300,000 dollars. He had insurance though. One hospitalization would break most people.

[Mojorabbit]

2. kick