This article looks at health insurance coverage for adults in America during the first half of 2020. This article presents results from the Commonwealth Fund’s latest Biennial Health Insurance Survey, which assesses the extent and quality of coverage for U.S. working-age adults. The survey began in 2001 and has three measures to gauge the adequacy of insurance coverage. The first is whether or not people have insurance. The second is if they have insurance and whether they experienced a gap in coverage in the prior year. The third is whether high out-of-pocket costs and deductibles are causing them to be underinsured, despite having continuous coverage throughout the year.

The survey for this article began in January of 2020. A nationally representative sample of 4,272 adults ages 19 to 64 was interviewed about their health insurance coverage through June 5.

The article gives important highlights of the survey, explains who is underinsured, and gives a graph that shows the percentage change of people that are underinsured over ten years.

The article goes on to present many graphs that present the percentage of ethnic groups who are uninsured, the change over time of adults in employer plans that are underinsured, change over time of the percentage of adults with a share of private insurance with deductibles of $1,000 or more, the percentage of people with inadequate insurance coverage that have more problems paying medical bills, the percentage of medical debt that leaves people with lingering financial problems, the percentage of uninsured or underinsured adults who often avoid or delay getting needed health care and medications, the percentage of people with higher deductibles who report financial problems more frequently because of medical bills or delaying care because of cost, then finally the percentage of adults who look for but do not buy plans in the individual market or marketplaces cite because of affordability.

The article concludes by explaining how the study was conducted.

This article and information relate to Social Injustice by showing the high uninsured rates of ethnic groups. The uninsured rates of black and Latino people are much higher than the uninsured rate of white people.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2020/aug/looming-crisis-health-coverage-2020-biennial