Hard times and health insurance: how many Americans will be uninsured by 2010?

In earlier work we demonstrated that increases in the cost of health care accounted for the decline in insurance coverage from 1979 to 2002. Here we examine whether our model adequately accounts for observed changes in coverage though 2007, and we provide an estimate of the effects of the recession on the number of uninsured Americans through 2010. We project that the number will increase by at least 6.9 million. The estimate does not directly take into account the additional effects of job losses, which are likely to add millions more to the number of uninsured Americans.