国际英语新闻:Poor Americans Struggle With High Health Care Costs

The unemployment rate in the United States remains above nine percent, as it was last year, and not all employers are required to provide health benefits. 

Elise Gould is the director of health policy research at the Economy Policy Institute in Washington.  She told reporters that young adults aged 18 to 24 are the least likely to be covered by their employers. 

Gould credited recent government initiatives with improving their access to health care.

"Health reform played a key role in stemming the fall of workplace coverage for young adults.  The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as 'health reform', included provisions that allowed young adults up to age 26 to secure health insurance coverage through their parents' employer-sponsored health insurance policies," Gould said. 

The officials say one-third of people without insurance live in poverty.  According to the 2010 census figures, the official poverty rate was 15.1 percent - up from 14.3 percent in 2009. 

In the United States, a family of four is considered to live in poverty if the household income is below about $22,000.  

Dr. Tim Hulsey told lawmakers Tuesday that poverty has different meanings throughout the world.  A cosmetic surgeon, Hulsey has provided medical care to children with cleft palates in Central America.  He described cardboard houses, polluted water sources and no sanitation, which he said can be a death sentence. 

Hulsey said in the United States, Americans have opportunities to adopt healthy lifestyles and more care options such as free clinics, charity organizations, and doctors who are willing to volunteer their services, as he does.

"In other words, there is little reason other than failure to seek care that poverty should be a death sentence in this country,"  Hulsey said.

Economist Greenstein acknowledged to reporters that just as Americans are dealing with health care issues, U.S. lawmakers are dealing with budget shortfalls. 

"Even before today's grim figures, the United States had higher degrees of poverty and inequality than most other Western industrialized nations.  We need deficit reduction, but it need not make these problems even more severe than they already are," Greenstein said.

While the number of people living in poverty and the number of uninsured are similar, it is not only impoverished people who do not have health insurance. 

One-fifth of America's 50 million uninsured have a household income of more than $75,000 a year.