Uninsured To Cough Up $30 Billion In Medical Care

A heavy burden of $30 billion awaits Americans without health insurance this year.

According to a new report released on Monday by Jack Hadley of George Mason University in Virginia and a team at the Urban Institute, the government is going to pay about 75% of an additional $56 billion in health costs - or $42 billion - for the uninsured. The rest is to be covered by private medicos, community groups and hospitals.

Current estimates show 47 million Americans lack any health insurance, and 28 million have been without cover for some part of the year. The U.S. Census bureau is scheduled to release fresh estimates on Tuesday.

On average, an uninsured American shells out $583 toward average annual medical costs of $1,686 per person, Hadley's team reported in the journal Health Affairs. The annual medical costs of Americans with private insurance average a lot more -- $3,915, with $681 or 17 percent paid personally, the report found.

"The uninsured receive a lot less care than the insured, and they pay a greater percentage of it out of pocket. Contrary to popular myth, they are not all free riders. From society's perspective, covering the uninsured is still a good investment. Failure to act in the near term will only make it more expensive to cover the uninsured in the future, while adding to the amount of lost productivity from not insuring all Americans," Hadley said in a statement.

The cost of expanding coverage to the uninsured would scale national health spending by 5%, Hadley added.

Hadley said that the benefits of expanded health coverage could translate into greater productivity and greater tax revenues for the government, in addition to the value of good health.

"Spending on health care is not like spending on going to the movies," Hadley said. "There's an intrinsic value to good health, in addition to the ability to work effectively."

The high cost of health care and the problem of not having insurance are only going to worsen over time, the study noted.

"Given the focus of presidential campaigns on health care reform, it seems this would be a good time to address high cost of care ... and the problem of not having insurance," Hadley said. "The cost of covering the insured will be more expensive if we continue to wait," he added.