More than 2 million American children have no health insurance because their parents can’t afford it, according to a new study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Jennifer DeVoe, MD, DPhil, from Oregon Health and Science University, and colleagues analyzed the records of 39,588 children and teenagers and found that 3.3% were uninsured, with at least one insured parent. Researchers looked at data resealed by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, for the time interval 2002 - 2005.

“We found about 3 percent of children in the U.S. are uninsured with an insured parent. And that translates to over 3 million children,” said Dr. Jennifer DeVoe, who’s in the Department of Family Medicine at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, Ore.

The phenomenon is prevalent in families with middle income, with parents earning somewhere between $25,000 and $75,000 a year for a family of four. Other elements associated with uninsured children were parents with less than a high school education, Hispanic ethnicity, single-parent households, geographic residence in the south or west, and having a parent with private insurance coverage.

The study suggests that some families earn too much to qualify for state insurance programs, but not enough to afford adding their kids to employer-sponsored policies.

More than 9 million children and adolescents in the U.S. have no health insurance coverage. 28% of them have an insured parent.

The study’s authors found that more than 1 million children had no coverage for the entire year. They suggest that the employer-based model may need to be revised. Advocates of the State Children Health Insurance Program say that a short-term solution would be to expand coverage beyond certain children in low- and moderate-income families.

The private health insurance has become more and more expensive and other reports have shown that as the health care costs continue to grow, fewer employees are able to offer insurance benefits.

Private health insurance is far from being efficient. It constitutes an expensive bureaucracy that stands between patients and doctors.

A report released by the U.S. Census Bureau revealed that the number of Americans on Medicaid, the government-backed health insurance for people with a low income, rose from 38.3 million to 39.6 million. The controversial report found that the median household income rose slightly to $50,200 in 2007, with an increase of 1.3 percent from 2006. At the same time, the number of children living in poverty increased by 500,000 to 13.3 million.

The Bureau estimated that the population of children not covered by a health insurance grew last year from 8.0 million/10.9 percent respectively, in 2005, to 8.7 million in 2006/11.7 percent- “an increase of 9 percent in one year alone” according to Karen Davis, Ph.D., President, The Commonwealth Found. With an uninsured rate in 2006 at 19.3 percent, children in poverty were more likely to be uninsured than all children.