CT Health Notes Factoids 2004 - 2007

CT Health Facts

• In 2007, 326,000 Connecticut residents did not have health insurance. 43,000 of them were children below the age of 18. ¹
• One in eleven Connecticut residents do not visit a doctor due to cost. ²
• In Connecticut, health care costs are expected to rise 4.6% in 2010. ³
• In 2007, 19.4 percent of American families reported problems paying medical bills, even though almost 60% of these families were insured at the time the debt was incurred. One in five people who had problems with medical bills considered filing for bankruptcy, and of these, approximately 2.2 million people ended up filing for bankruptcy. ⁴
• In FY 2006, there were approximately 48,000 avoidable hospitalizations in Connecticut costing approximately $1 billion (avoidable hospitalizations are those that could have been avoided through timely and effective outpatient primary care). ⁵
• 21% of Connecticut residents are enrolled in a health maintenance organization (HMO); we have the fifteenth highest enrollment in the nation. ⁶
• Connecticut's per person health care spending is 20% higher than the US average. ⁷
• Only 5.0% of Connecticut's 15,257 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. ⁸
• One in eight Connecticut non-farm workers are employed in the health care sector. ⁹
• 15.9% of Connecticut adults (one in six) smoke cigarettes. The figure is up by half of a percentage point from the 2007 number. ¹⁰
• One in six Connecticut high school students smoke. ¹¹
• There were 2,905 births to Connecticut teenagers in 2006. ¹²
• In 2008, 358 AIDS and 387 HIV cases were reported in CT. Cumulatively, there are 10,860 people who were reported living with HIV/AIDS in CT. ¹³
• One in ten of Connecticut's public school children have asthma. ¹⁴
• On an annual basis, Connecticut spends a total of $47.3 million on hospitalization charges and $13.4 million on emergency visit charges due to asthma as a primary diagnosis. ¹⁵
• From 2000 – 2004, children living in Hartford are 28 times more likely to visit an emergency room for an asthma emergency than children living in Westport. ¹⁶

Updated May 2009 by Selina Tirtajana, CTHPP Intern. Originally compiled December 2007 by Wilbur Hu and George Norberg, CTHPP 2007 Yale Interns.

Sources:

1. US Census Current Population Reports. Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007. Issued August 2008.
2. Statehealthfacts.org, Connecticut: Percentage Reporting Not Seeing a Doctor in the Past 12 Months Because of Cost, 2007.
3. Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. National Health Expenditure Projections: 2008 - 2018. February 2009.
4. Peter J. Cunningham. Trade-offs getting tougher: Problems paying medical bills increase for U.S. families, 2003 - 2007. Center for Studying Health System Change Tracking Report no. 21. September 2008.
5. Connecticut Office of Health Care Access. Preventable Hospitalizations in Connecticut: Assessing access to Community Health Services, Office of Health Care Access, FY 2000-2006, April 2008.
6. Statehealthfacts.org Individual State Profiles. Connecticut: Total HMO Enrollment, July 2008. Data as of July 2008.
7. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Health Expenditure Data: by State of Residence. 2007 (2004 data).
8. CTHPP calculation of DSS & AMA (American Medical Association) numbers. Number of Medicaid-credentialed physicians is obtained from DSS Provider Search.
9. Connecticut Department of Labor. CT Economic Digest, May 2009.
10. Centers for Disease Control, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2008.
11. Connecticut Department of Public Health, Cigarette Smoking Among Connecticut Youth, 2007.
12. Connecticut Department of Public Health, Connecticut Resident Births, 2006.
13. Connecticut Department of Public Health, AIDS Surveillance Report, 2008.
14. Connecticut Department of Public Health, Asthma in Connecticut 2008: A Surveillance Report. 2008.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid

Updated: June 07, 2009