Why Are Nearly 40 Million American Adults Not Using the Internet?
For most of use, the Internet is inescapable. We use the Web for everything from paying bills and writing emails to signing up for health insurance and watching our favorite shows.
However, a surprisingly large number of adults in the U.S. have resisted the siren call of the digital life. According to new data from Pew Research, 15% of the adult U.S. population is not online.
Who makes up this group of Internet naysayers? Here are some highlights:
- Unsurprisingly, adults aged 65 and older make up the largest single age group (39 percent) most likely to say they never go online.
- The higher the level of educational achievement, the greater the likelihood of Internet usage. For adults with less than a high school education, a third do not use the Internet.
- Household income is also a significant factor. Adults in the most affluent households are eight times more likely to use the Internet than adults in households with an income of less than $30,000 per year. Nineteen percent of the non-users cite the high expense of Internet service or owning a computer.
- Americans living in rural areas are twice as likely as individuals in urban or suburban regions to not use the Internet.
- As for race and ethnicity, 20 percent of blacks and 18 percent of Hispanics do not use the Internet, compared with 14 percent of whites and 5 percent of English-speaking Asian-Americans.
- While 34 percent of people who do not use the Internet choose not to, for others it’s not a choice, according to an earlier Pew report.
- Thirty-two percent say the Internet is too complicated or difficult to use.
Coming Soon: Deductible Relief Day!
You may be familiar with the concept of Tax Freedom Day – the date on which you have earned enough to pay all of your taxes for the year. Focusing on a different kind of financial burden, analysts at the Kaiser Family Foundation have created Deductible Relief Day – the date on which people in employer-sponsored insurance plans have spent enough on health care to meet the average annual deductible.
Average deductibles have more than tripled over the last decade, forcing people to spend more out of pocket each year. As a result, Deductible Relief Day is “getting later and later in the year,” Kaiser’s Larry Levitt said in a tweet Thursday.
Chart of the Day: Families Still Struggling
Ten years into what will soon be the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, 40% of families say they are still struggling, according to a new report from the Urban Institute. “Nearly 4 in 10 nonelderly adults reported that in 2018, their families experienced material hardship—defined as trouble paying or being unable to pay for housing, utilities, food, or medical care at some point during the year—which was not significantly different from the share reporting these difficulties for the previous year,” the report says. “Among adults in families with incomes below twice the federal poverty level (FPL), over 60 percent reported at least one type of material hardship in 2018.”
Chart of the Day: Pragmatism on a Public Option
A recent Morning Consult poll 3,073 U.S. adults who say they support Medicare for All shows that they are just as likely to back a public option that would allow Americans to buy into Medicare or Medicaid without eliminating private health insurance. “The data suggests that, in spite of the fervor for expanding health coverage, a majority of Medicare for All supporters, like all Americans, are leaning into their pragmatism in response to the current political climate — one which has left many skeptical that Capitol Hill can jolt into action on an ambitious proposal like Medicare for All quickly enough to wrangle the soaring costs of health care,” Morning Consult said.
Chart of the Day: The Explosive Growth of the EITC
The Earned Income Tax Credit, a refundable tax credit for low- to moderate-income workers, was established in 1975, with nominal claims of about $1.2 billion ($5.6 billion in 2016 dollars) in its first year. According to the Tax Policy Center, by 2016 “the total was $66.7 billion, almost 12 times larger in real terms.”
Chart of the Day: The Big Picture on Health Care Costs
“The health care services that rack up the highest out-of-pocket costs for patients aren't the same ones that cost the most to the health care system overall,” says Axios’s Caitlin Owens. That may distort our view of how the system works and how best to fix it. For example, Americans spend more out-of-pocket on dental services ($53 billion) than they do on hospital care ($34 billion), but the latter is a much larger part of national health care spending as a whole.
