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Monitoring the Lack of Health Insurance Coverage in New Hampshire

Why Are Trends in Lack of Health Insurance Important?

In a June 2005 Center report entitled "Monitoring Changes in Health Insurance Coverage" the Center argued that monitoring the number of New Hampshire residents that lack health insurance was at least as important as knowing the number of unemployed in the state, and that the state had no regular program or method to monitor how many residents lack health insurance. The report underlined the need to monitor the number of people lacking health insurance:

Health finance professionals, employers, and the news media have all noted that increasing health care costs are driving up the price of health insurance and that employers are shifting more of the cost of health insurance premiums onto employees directly or are dropping health insurance benefits altogether. A "death spiral" has been hypothesized in which relatively healthy individuals opt out of their costly insurance which, in turn, raises the rates for those remaining in the risk pool, thus driving out even more of the healthy.

Is the "death spiral" real or just theoretical? There has been little change in recent years (prior to 2005) in the percentage of New Hampshire residents without insurance, but if that number started to change, how would we know? If health insurance coverage of the population begins to decline, New Hampshire's policy makers would need to know about it as soon as possible. Yet the state has no consistent organized method to determine what may be happening.