Health Insurance About To Get Very Expensive For America's Unemployed
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Paying for health insurance gets a lot more expensive this week for the unemployed.
Millions of unemployed Americans pay for health insurance offered by their old companies through COBRA, and the federal government has been helping pay those premiums as part of the federal stimulus act.
But that assistance ends September 1st, according to Laval Miller-Wilson, executive director of the Pennsylvania Health Law Project.
"For a typical family the subsidy reduced the cost of their health care costs to $4,725 a year, now it will increase to $13,000," he says.
And Miller-Wilson says this will result in more people dropping health insurance because they can't afford it, and turning to the emergency room for primary medical care.
Reported by Lynne Adkins, KYW Newsradio 1060
