Almost across the board among working-age adults, fewer people are sans health insurance, whether they acquire coverage via employee benefits, the exchanges or Medicaid, a newly released federal survey has discovered.
The uninsured rate dipped in over 2,260 counties between 2013 and 2014, according to new statistics detailed by the U.S. Census Bureau. More specifically, 72 percent of adults 18 to 64 years of age were able to obtain coverage in the 12-month period.
The estimated uninsured rate has fallen even more substantially when you include everyone 65 and under, the report found. Approximately 74 percent of counties witnessed a decline the number of individuals who didn't have access to health coverage, confined specifically to those of age to participate in the labor force.
Lauren Bowers, a statistician for the social economic and housing statistics division of the U.S. Census Bureau, said that these numbers provide health officials with an understanding of who is able to obtain coverage so that they can better afford preventive care, particularly for those who have limited means.
"One way communities use these health insurance statistics is to guide access to screening services for breast and cervical cancer among low-income women," Bowers explained. "For example, our estimates indicate that working-age females had a lower uninsured rate than males in about 40 percent of counties."
Majority of states expanded Medicaid
A core component of the Affordable Care Act – which was passed and signed into law in 2010 but didn't go fully into effect until 2014 – was to provide everyone with increased opportunities to get covered. Much of this has been achieved by the expansion of Medicaid eligibility. Among the majority of states that did so, 96 percent of counties within said states saw the rate of individuals without health insurance decrease, the Census Bureau reported. Meanwhile, the uninsured rate fell in just 37 percent of counties in states that decided to maintain the old standards of who can and can't receive Medicaid benefits.
Not only do more people today have health insurance, many have a greater number of options for where they'd like to receive medical treatment, based on a separate report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. For example, nearly 85 percent of Hispanics had a "usual place to go for medical care" last year, up from slightly over 77 percent in 2010.
Sharon Arnold, Ph.D., AHRQ deputy director, said the health care reform law has been especially conducive to Americans who are making much less than the national media – $52,000 – getting health insurance.
Other recent analyses have revealed similar findings to the government's report on the reduction of people without health insurance. For example, Gallup found in an April poll that the uninsured rate among black and Hispanic Americans has slipped to the greatest extent among subgroups. In the closing quarter of 2013, around 28 percent of Latinos didn't have health plans in place. Nearly three years later through the first three months of 2016, the Hispanic uninsured rate has plummeted to 17 percent.
Stephanie Marken, methodologist at Gallup, indicated that all signs suggest that the nation's uninsured rate will continue to diminish, but the pace may slow down considering that more people are covered and the principal tenets of the ACA are more or less fully in place.
