Our Mission: The mission of our Centre County Partnership for Community Health is to support an inclusive, caring community that promotes healthy people and enhances quality of life through collaborative relationships.
Our Guiding Objective: To assess the health needs of Centre County residents and to develop outreach and partnering efforts that will bridge gaps in service and eliminate barriers to holistic health.
Centre County Health Care Cost Overview
The text presented here provides a general overview of health care costs in Centre County. This information may be copied/shared freely.
The cost of health care has increased at a rate much greater than the rate of inflation and in all likelihood that trend will continue. This trend has been and continues to be of great concern to consumers, providers and employers as they all struggle to meet the increasing costs of care. Many factors contribute to this increase which include rising costs of liability insurance for providers, rising costs for hospital care, increases in the costs of prescription drugs and the increase use of medical care as our population ages.
As a result, employees are contributing more toward their health insurance, consumers are paying more in out-of-pocket expenses, employers are either reducing benefits or having employees contribute more and more people are without any health insurance. For example, employer sponsored health insurance premiums increased an average of 9.2% in 2005 - less than last year's 11.2% increase but still a continuing rise in costs. The actual cost of premiums in 2005 reached an average of $10,880 annually for family health insurance coverage and $4,024 for single coverate. (source The Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation - www.kff.org)
Employer-based insurance has been steadily decreasing since 2000, for both children and adults. Children's enrollment in both Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) has been increasing in response to the greater numbers of children who qualify and improved outreach efforts. The share of children who are uninsured has actually decreased over this four year period and the number of uninsured children has remained steady since 2000, at about nine million even as the number of children living in poverty has grown.
In contrast, while public coverage has increased among adults, it has not
been nearly enough to buffer them from the loss of job-based coverage. Adults
are eligible for Medicaid if severely disabled, pregnant, or have dependent
children (but generally they qualify only at much lower income levels than
their children). The number of uninsured adults has grown by over 6 million
since 2000, accounting for all of the growth in
the uninsured. The share of nonelderly adults who are uninsured has grown
by nearly three percentage points between 2000 and 2004 (17.9% to 20.6%).
Two-thirds of the growth in the number of uninsured adults has been among
those with low incomes and half among 19-34 year olds. (source The Henry J.
Kaiser Family Foundation - www.kff.org)
The above website contains considerable information regarding health care
costs and they are fairly easy to navigate. Other sources of this information
are listed on the webpage - the information and ease of navigation varies
considerably.
