The lost decade
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
“We’ve basically seen a lost decade,” said Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University.”We had a plutocratic boom. Then we have egalitarian recessions. Taken together, only the top ends up growing, on average. For the typical American family, the 2000s have been a disaster.”
A new study by Harvard Medical School researchers has found that in the United States 45,000 deaths a year result from lack of insurance. That’s more than twice the previous estimate of 18,000, which was based on 1993 data. That makes the toll from lack of health insurance more than the number of persons killed by drunk driving and homicides combined. To put it in perspective, each year, lack of health insurance kills almost 9 times the number of American troops who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan combined since the wars began.
The study comes at a time when millions of Americans have lost or are at risk of losing coverage because of growing unemployment. This is the backdrop in which Congress is debating health reform legislation.
The Harvard researchers found that adults 64 years old or younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher chance of death than those who have insurance.
One of the reasons for the increase in deaths is a steady rise in the number of the uninsured. About 46.3 million people in the United States lacked coverage in 2008, compared with 45.7 million in 2007. The trend underscores the need for a strong health reform law that provides universal coverage at a reasonable cost.
Another factor is that public hospitals and clinics are closing or cutting services across the country. Study co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler said the findings show that without proper care, uninsured people are more likely to die from complications associated with treatable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.
The Harvard study comes on the heels of a new Census Bureau comprehensive economic survey that shows that the recession has plunged 2.6 million more Americans into poverty, wiping out the household income gains of an entire decade. The data was collected in the spring, before hundreds of thousands of new people were added to the unemployment rolls.
The nation’s poverty rate rose to 13.2 percent in 2008, up from 12.5 percent in 2007. That was the first significant increase since 2004 and the highest level in 11 years.
Moreover, these figures are based on the unrealistically low official poverty rate defined as an income of $22,025 for a family of four.
It wasn’t just the poor that experienced the damage from a shrinking economy. Median household income — the amount earned by a family at the exact center of the income scale — declined 3.6 percent in 2008: from $52,163 to $50,303. The income loss is the largest one-year decline on record, said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. Blacks and Hispanics suffered disproportionately from the economic crisis.
“We’ve basically seen a lost decade,” said Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University. “We had a plutocratic boom. Then we have egalitarian recessions. Taken together, only the top ends up growing, on average. For the typical American family, the 2000s have been a disaster.”
