San Francisco Chronicle Monday, Sept 7th 1992 NUMBER OF UNINSURED CALIFORNIANS LIKELY TO RISE 40% Study says 8.5 million could be without health coverage by 2000 by Sabin Russell About 2.5 million more Californians, mostly working people and their families, will have no health insurance by the year 2000, according to a sobering new forecast released this Labor Day. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reports that, without significant reforms or changes in demographic trends, the ranks of the medically uninsured at decade's end will grow 40 percent to 8.5 million, from 6 million today. "A bad situation is going to get a lot worse unless something is done," said Drew Altman, the president of the Menlo Park foundation. "There are some things that might change the situation, but all the big arrows are pointing in the wrong direction." According to the report, 87 percent of California's uninsured are working people and their families. Sixteen percent of the state's fulltime workers have no health insurance, compared with 10 percent in the rest of the nation. Because so many working families have no coverage, 23 percent of California's children have no health insurance today, compared with 17 percent nationwide. The erosion of health care coverage is being caused by a series of converging trends. Insurance costs continue to soar, making it unaffordable for many employers. New jobs are appearing in the service, retail and small business sectors, where health insurance benefits are scarce. Part-time workers, who are less likely to have health benefits, are projected to account for 18.3 percent of the labor market by the year 2000, compared with 17.6 percent in 1990. Young adults are likely to bear the brunt of California's trend toward loss of medical insurance. As young people grow out of the family coverage from their parents, they will face a world of part-time jobs that do not offer health insurance. If current trends continue, half of all young working adults in California will be without health insurance by the year 2000, the study says. California's Hispanic population, which is three times more likely to be uninsured than non-Hispanic whites or blacks, is growing at twice the rate of the total state population. About 40 percent of Hispanics in California have no health insurance, a consequence of settlement patterns in rural areas where medical care is less available as well as language barriers and reluctance to press for health care benefits because of undocumented status. "If the economy fails to recover, and there is increased unemployment or underemployment, these projections will seem conservative," said Ian Morrison, president of the Institute for the Future, a Menlo Park economic forecasting firm that conducted the study for the Kaiser Foundation. Morrison acknowledges that changes in immigration or the economy would affect the trends that feed his projections, but he does not believe that even a bad economy will reduce the number of people who want to live here. "Around the world, California is perceived as a land of opportunity, a chance to make a better life," he said, noting that he migrated from Scotland by way of Canada. "It's not a problem. It's part of the history of California."