More in US lacking health insurance

WASHINGTON -- The economy started creating jobs again last year, but the number of working-age adults who had gone without health insurance for more than a year jumped sharply, the government reported yesterday.

An additional 2.6 million people between the ages of 18 and 64 were uninsured for more than a year, boosting the total to 24.5 million, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report, released by the agency's National Center for Health Statistics, is the government's first statistical look at health coverage in 2003, when the economy began reversing the job losses that started with the 2001 recession.

The increase in the number of the nation's long-term uninsured, which Robin A. Cohen of the health statistics center called ''quite a significant jump," underscored the decreasing likelihood that a job guarantees access to health insurance, analysts said.

''As we lose jobs in the manufacturing sector to jobs in the service economy and small businesses, we're losing the stability of big employers and replacing it with a much more fragile system," said Diane Rowland, executive director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. ''Our uninsured problem is becoming more of a permanent problem instead of a temporary, transitional problem."

Some 20 million US families, or one in seven, had difficulty paying medical bills last year, according to a report this week by the Center for Studying Health System Change.