Middle-class Americans – those with incomes from $44,000 to $88,000 – face mounting out-of-pocket costs that are eroding household disposable income available for food, shelter, and energy line items.
While most of the uninsured are from lower-income families, 11 million of the uninsured live in middle class working families. Most of the growth of the uninsured between 2004 and 2007 – 70% – is in the middle class.
The chart tells the tale: the gap between health premium increases and workers’ wages continues to widen, making health insurance unaffordable for more working families.
Health Care and the Middle Class: More Costs and Less Coverage, a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation published in July 2009, points out that, “workers have to spend more of their income each year on health care in order to maintain their current level of coverage.”
Damn. Sometimes graphs do tell the best story.
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