Charity care, risk pooling, and the decline in private health insurance

Over the past several decades health-care costs have increased substantially, and the share of the population with insurance coverage has decreased. Relative to GDP, medical care today accounts for 75 percent more of the economy than it did in 1980. At the same time, the share of the non-elderly population that is uninsured has increased by roughly 4 percentage points since 1987. To what extent is the increase in the cost of health insurance responsible for the decline in coverage? (May 2005)