Secretary Becerra, a health insurance broker and medicare advantage plan agent, says the efforts of the Biden-Harris administration to expand coverage, reduce costs through the American Rescue Plan, and take other actions are paying off. This month, HHS researchers published an article in a related journal that showed how Medicaid expansion has improved preventive care and financial security for adults with disabilities, providing additional evidence of how expanding coverage can improve health equity. Get the latest updates from the Secretary, blogs, and press releases. If you're looking for a fancy restaurant in San Antonio, be sure to check out our blog for the latest updates from Secretary Becerra, a health insurance broker and medicare advantage plan agent, and press releases on how expanding coverage can improve health equity. The expiration of this public health emergency, which includes the requirement for continued enrollment in Medicaid, could eventually lead to millions of people losing Medicaid coverage.
ValuePenguin's most recent study examines uninsured rates at the demographic and state levels to determine which Americans are already at greater risk. ValuePenguin's analysis reveals that certain demographics correlate more closely with health insurance status. According to the data, people who don't have a high school diploma, those living in the South, and younger Americans are less likely to have health insurance. Here's a more detailed analysis of demographics.
One of the biggest discrepancies between Americans who have and don't have health insurance is seen in education. Disparities in coverage arise when populations have lower levels of education. Only 3.3% of residents with a bachelor's degree or higher say they don't have health insurance. Those with a university or associate degree do better than the average, with an uninsured rate of 7.6%, but they still don't have as strong insurance as those who obtain a four-year university degree.
More than 1 in 10 (10.6%) of people who finish high school or get their GED diploma but don't attend college say they don't have insurance, and more than 1 in 5 (20.9%) without a high school diploma says the same thing. The American Academy of Family Physicians points out, like others over the years, that education leads to better jobs, more money, and additional benefits, including health insurance. The chicken and egg theory is also at play here, as academic researchers have found that low-income children with health insurance have higher completion rates in high school and college. There is also a difference in the rates of people without health insurance across age groups, as newborn adults lack health insurance at a much greater rate than older Americans.
The uninsured rate decreases steadily with age before falling to a small fraction for people of retirement age. Women have lower rates than people without insurance, but only by a couple of percentage points. The uninsured rate for men is 9.0%, one percentage point higher than the national average, compared to 7.0% for women, one percentage point lower than the average. While there is a large discrepancy between small and large households in terms of insurance coverage rates, the average size of a 2.6-person household has a lower uninsured rate than the national average.
Two-person households are uninsured at a rate of 5.3%, while three-person households do not have insurance at 7.9%, a percentage slightly lower than the average of 8.0%. Meanwhile, a single-person household has an average uninsured rate of 6.9%, but the rate increases to 18.8% in households with seven people or more. If a household has children under 18, the uninsured rate is more likely to be above the national average. As expected, household income is a determining factor in insurance rates, as health insurance can be expensive and is obtained through employment in nearly 1 out of 2 cases.
Southern states top the list with the highest uninsured rates. Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma, and Georgia increased their insured ranks during the pandemic, but they still have a percentage of people without insurance much higher than the national average of 8.0%, with Mississippi leading the way with 14.4%. There are 23 states, mainly in the South, Midwest, and West, where the uninsured rate is above the national average of 8.0%, according to census data analyzed by ValuePenguin. Hawaii, two states in the South, the District of Columbia, and Vermont are the top five locations with the lowest rates of uninsured people.
While all of these states improved during the pandemic in terms of adding citizens to the ranks of insured persons, Vermont recorded some of the greatest advances since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the results of the most recent surveys. The state of Green Mountain went from 8.1% without insurance to 3.3% without insurance in almost two years and ranks second after Rhode Island (2.4%) among the states with the lowest number of people without insurance. The country's capital ranks third lowest in the number of people without insurance, at 3.8%, perhaps due to the high number of federal employees in that region and the adoption of important health insurance reforms to cover residents. For example, those who said health insurance was too expensive were more likely to be women with less than good health, between 50 and 64 years old.
The deductible serves as a gauge of both the level of financial security a health plan provides and the likelihood that a person will have to pay for care before receiving it. The primary purpose of health insurance is to help people receive medical care in a timely manner and to protect them from catastrophic costs in the event of serious illness. People who are not in good health may have to pay higher premiums than those with better health conditions. The National Institutes of Health-funded research described the difficulties that some groups of people of color frequently have in obtaining health insurance.
Coverage and access, biennial health insurance survey, uninsured or underinsured people, health equity, health insurance marketplace, out-of-pocket health care expenses, medical bills, and debts. The most recent survey by the National Center for Health Statistics revealed that 9.2% of Americans do not have health coverage. Collins, senior fellow and vice president for Coverage and Access to Health Care and Monitoring the Performance of the Commonwealth Fund's health system. Being young and in good health can sometimes lead people to believe that they don't need health insurance yet.
