September 10, 2011
Filed under: Insurance
The numbers aren’t too pretty. Underinsured adults — those with health insurance all year and very high medical expenses relative to their incomes, rose by 80% between 2003-2010, from 16 million to 29 million. Nearly half of U.S. adults, 81 million people, were either underinsured or uninsured in 2010, up from 75 million in 2007 and 61 million in 2003.
The staggering stats come from the study, Affordable Care Act Reforms Could Reduce the Number of Underinsured U.S. Adults by 70 Percent, authored by staff of The Commonwealth Fund, and published in Health Affairs.
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For many households, it’s a personal fiance dilemma: Should they try to pay down debt first, or build up savings? In the aftermath of the Great Recession, opinions have clearly tipped toward the ditch-your-debt side.
Janet Barbour wanted to take her 11-year-old grandson Brian to Disney World, but money had been tight since her husband’s death. So the 63-year-old Barbour arranged a loan through an Internet pawn broker called 
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There’s something about life insurance that just freaks some people out. For one thing, it forces them to confront the notion of dying. For another, it demands they think about tomorrow when they don’t know what to do about today. So instead, they stick their heads in the sand.
Bank of America representatives clad in red polo shirts manned the entrances to the Marriott’s 11th floor in midtown Manhattan on a recent Thursday. Tables were stocked with ballpoint pens and breath mints. Signage in English and Spanish pointed distressed New York City-area homeowners and their families to the registration desk, and onward through a flow of rooms that contained all the resources required to arrange a loan modification, get counseling, or make a plan to transition out of a home they could no longer afford. 
The reverse mortgage was invented decades ago to help seniors facing economic hardship access the equity in their homes. Between 1990 and 2010, more than 660,000 reverse mortgages were issued, according to the AARP. Today, the products are aggressively marketed through ads featuring Boomer-friendly spokespeople such as Henry Winkler (the Fonz from Happy Days). But these products are complicated, expensive and ripe for abuse, which lead a reader named Fred to ask: 
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Hurricane Irene’s swath through the Caribbean this week probably left many of the no-longer paradise-bound wondering: Should I have taken out travel insurance?
In 1932, Wisconsin enacted the first state unemployment insurance plan in response to the Great Depression. Three years later, President Franklin Roosevelt established a program on a national level as part of Social Security legislation. Today, unemployment insurance available in all states, providing money for out-of-work adults and is funded by both federal and state taxes. Yet for most people who have lost their jobs, those unemployment checks are hardly enough to cover all the family bills.