CT Health Facts

• • 325,000 Connecticut residents do not have health insurance. ¹
• • One in thirteen Connecticut residents do not visit a doctor due to cost ², that numbers jumps to one out of three when looking at adults earning below the federal poverty level. ³
• • Health care costs are expected to rise 7.3% this year. ⁴
• • More than half of bankruptcies are caused by medical bills and of those bankruptcies they are equally as likely as those filing bankruptcy for non-medical reasons to not have health insurance. ⁵
• • In FY 2004, there were approximately 50,000 avoidable hospitalizations in Connecticut costing approximately $900 million; avoidable hospitalizations are those that could have been avoided through timely and effective outpatient primary care. ^{5 6}
• • 36.1% of Connecticut residents are in a health maintenance organization; we are the fifth highest state in the nation. ⁷
• • Connecticut's per person spending is 19% higher than the US average per person spending. ⁸
• • 5.7% of Connecticut’s 15,047 licensed physicians and surgeons are Medicaid-credentialed, meaning they are eligible to provide care in the program. It is not clear how many of that number accept Medicaid patients. ⁹
• • Health care directly employs one in eight Connecticut non-farm workers. ¹⁰
• • One in six Connecticut adults smokes cigarettes. ¹¹
• • One in four Connecticut high school seniors smoke; 13% of all high school smokers start before the age of 13. ¹²
• • 2,909 Connecticut teenagers gave birth in 2004. ¹³
• • 15,140 Connecticut residents have been diagnosed with AIDS. ¹⁴
• • One in nine of Connecticut’s public school children has asthma. ¹⁵
• • Children living in Hartford are 28 times more likely to visit an emergency room for an asthma emergency than children living in Westport. ¹⁶

Compiled December 2007 by Wilbur Hu and George Norberg, CTHPP 2007 Yale Interns

Sources:

1. US Census, March 2006 CPS
2. Centers for Disease Control, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2001
3. The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, 2007
4. C. Borger, et. al., Health Spending Projections Through 2015: Changes on the Horizon, Health Affairs, Web Exclusives, 2/22/06.
5. Himmelstein, Warren, Thorne, and Woolhander, Illness And Injury As Contributors to Bankruptcy, Health Affairs, February 2006
6. Preventable Hospitalizations in Connecticut: Assessing access to Community Health Services, Office of Health Care Access, FY 2000-2004
7. Health, United States, 2006, National Center for Health Statistics
8. CMS Personal Health Care Spending 2003-2004
9. CTHPP calculation of EDS & DPH numbers.
10. Connecticut Economic Digest, November 2007
11. Centers for Disease Control, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2006
12. Connecticut Department of Public Health, Connecticut School Health Survey Report, 2005
13. Connecticut Department of Public Health, 2002 Connecticut Resident Births
14. Connecticut Department of Public Health, AIDS Surveillance Report
15. Connecticut Department of Public Health, Connecticut School-based Asthma Surveillance School Years: 2004-2006, A Legislative Report
16. Ibid

Updated: December 05, 2007