Yesterday the U.S. Census Bureau published new reports on Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States as of 2022. Obviously all three of these are extremely important and interact closely with each other, but given that my focus is healthcare policy, I'm going to stick with the health insurance coverage portion.
According to the 2023 Current Population Survey Annual Social & Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC):
...92.1% of the U.S. population had health insurance coverage for all or part of 2022 (compared to 91.7% in 2021). An estimated 25.9 million or 7.9% of people did not have health insurance at any point during 2022, according to the 2023 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC). That compares to 27.2 million or 8.3% of people who did not have health insurance at any point during 2021.
Survey Results Come as Wallet Hub has Ranked the Ocean State as #1 in the Nation for the Best Health Care
EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I.– A preliminary analysis of the latest Rhode Island Health Insurance Survey (HIS) shows that Rhode Island has reached its lowest uninsured rate ever recorded. For the first time, just 2.9% of Rhode Islanders are uninsured, a reduction from the 4.0% the last time this survey was conducted in 2020. According to federally collected data through 2020, only Massachusetts and Vermont have ever recorded a state uninsured rate lower than 3.0%. This news comes as WalletHub has ranked Rhode Island as the best state in the country for health care.
Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the country has made amazing progress toward reducing the number of uninsured people, aided most recently by the Inflation Reduction Act’s continuation of enhanced premium subsidies. Census data show that 9.2% of U.S. residents were uninsured in 2019, compared to 15.5% in 2010 when the ACA passed. However, 30 million people still lack coverage.
The reasons for the high number of uninsured individuals include the Medicaid Gap, the family glitch and other barriers that prevent eligible individuals from signing up for coverage.Yet policy debates often exclude a population that is systematically and often statutorily excluded from coverage: immigrants.
Obviously a lot has changed since then, primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but I presume this is the most recent comprehensive, reliable data they've been able to compile:
Every quarter, Gallup posts the results of an exhaustive healthcare coverage survey (with over 25,000 U.S. adults). They just posted the latest update, which covers the fourth quarter of 2017, and the results are...striking.
Gallup has a rather annoying habit of not including the full Y-axis in their charts, so I've reformatted their quarterly survey results into a fuller version, noting a couple of key dates. The most obvious takeaway:
The U.S. uninsured rate among adults, which had reached 18% just before the major Affordable Care Act provisions (individual market exchanges and Medicaid expansion) kicked into effect, reached an all-time low of 10.9% last winter...
...only to reverse the trend since then, climbing back up again over the first year of the Trump Administration to end 2017 at 12.2%.
One important thing to keep in mind is that Gallup's surveys only include adults over 18, which means they only include about 77% of the population. Since children tend to have a much lower uninsured rate than adults (thanks in large part to programs like Medicaid and CHIP), this skews the results for the total population by several percentage points.
Today's the aniversary of my dad passing away. He was an Osteopathic physician, so today's Big News® would make him very happy, but I have to keep things short today so just a quick write-up:
I was kind of hoping that this morning's Gallup uninsured rate news would include a monthly update for July; instead, it only runs through the end of June, the same quarterly survey results that they released a month ago. Then again, things probably didn't change much in July.
Instead, this time they've broken the numbers out by state:
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Arkansas and Kentucky continue to have the sharpest reductions in their uninsured rates since the healthcare law took effect at the beginning of 2014. Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington join them as states that have at least a 10-percentage-point reduction in uninsured rates.
