Covering the uninsured: how much would it cost?

To provide benchmarks for evaluating the costs of alternative proposals to provide insurance coverage for the uninsured, this study presents two sets of cost estimates derived from medical spending patterns of lower- or middle-income people with private insurance plans and those of people with public insurance coverage during 1996-1998. The analysis suggests that the uninsured would use dollar 33.9-dollar 68.7 billion (in 2001 dollars) in additional medical care if they were fully insured. An increase in medical spending of this range would increase total health care spending by 3-6 percent and would raise health care's share of GDP by less than one percentage point.