Health care overhaul's impact on Georgia
With the Supreme Court ruling Thursday that President Barack Obama's federal health care overhaul can go forward, here's a look at numbers on Georgia health care and insurance.
Number of uninsured: 19.4 percent of Georgians, 1.9 million people, lacked insurance coverage in 2010, compared with 16.3 percent of Americans nationwide.
How Georgians have fared
851,076 -- Medicare beneficiaries who received free preventive services or wellness visits with their doctor last year.
123,000 -- Young adults who gained insurance coverage as a result of the law as of December 2011.
106,922 -- Medicare recipients who received a $250 rebate to bridge the donut hole gap in 2010
102,366 -- Medicare beneficiaries who received a 50 percent discount on brand name prescription drugs last year. That represents an average savings of $573 per person and statewide savings of more than $58.6 million.
3.3 million -- People, including nearly 1.3 million women and 916,000 kids, who no longer have to worry about lifetime limits on health benefits
2,066 -- Previously uninsured people with pre-existing conditions are now insured through the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan as of April 2012.
Who's insured in Georgia and how
- Since 2000, the likelihood of having employment-based coverage among the non-elderly has fallen from more than 75 percent to less than 55 percent.
- Roughly 90 percent of Georgians with private insurance coverage obtain that insurance through an employment-based plan.
- Of non-elderly Georgians who live in a family headed by a full-time, full-year worker, 69 percent have employment-based health insurance. That percentage falls to approximately 35 percent for those whose family head experienced some unemployment during the year, and to 15 percent for families headed by a non-worker.
- Less than a third of non-elderly Georgians whose family head is employed by a firm with fewer than 10 employees has employment-based health benefits versus 72 percent employed by firms with 100-plus workers.
- Less than one in five of those with family incomes below 138 percent of poverty have employer-sponsored insurance coverage, compared with 81 percent of those earning four or more times the poverty level.
- Some 80 percent of all uninsured individuals live in a family headed by someone with at least some attachment to the workforce.
- Georgians whose family head is working at firms with less than 10 employees make up 16 percent of the population but account for more than 29 percent without coverage.
- Families whose family head is working at Georgia's smallest firms are more likely to be uninsured (38 percent), compared with families headed by non-workers (32 percent).
- On average, Georgians spend $170 less out-of-pocket than the national average for health care services.
Impact on metro Atlanta companies
- Total health benefit costs for large employers (500 or more workers) in metro Atlanta increased 6.5 percent in 2011, to an average of $10,551 per employee. This compares to a 9 percent increase and $10,486 for all Atlanta employers and a 6.1 percent increase and $10,146 for all employers nationally.
- Atlanta companies estimated that in 2012, if they made no changes to their current plans, costs would rise 7.7 percent. But they expected to hold cost increases to 4.9 percent by making changes.
- Some 67 percent of Atlanta companies planned to shift cost to their employees in 2012 by raising deductibles, copays/coinsurance or out-of-pocket maximums, increasing employees' share of the premium contribution or other ways.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Mercer, Georgia State University
