“Not surprisingly, Gallup found seven of the 10 states with the greatest reduction in the uninsured have followed the same path as Kentucky by expanding Medicaid and establishing a state-based exchange”, Beshear said.
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A report from the pollster Gallup on state-level rates of uninsured, which has surveyed adults twice a year since before the law took effect in 2013, found that Texas is the only state left where more than 20% of adults remains uninsured.
For the first time in more than 50 years of surveys, the CDC on Wednesday reported that more than 90% of Americans – 90.8% of us, to be specific – have health insurance.
The proportion of Americans without insurance fell from 14.4 percent in 2013 to 9.2 percent in the first quarter of this year, the center said. Alaska Gov. Bill Walker recently announced he would pursue Medicaid expansion over the objection of his state’s legislature, and deep red Utah has also moved toward a modified form of Medicaid expansion in recent months.
So far, not one state has seen an increase in the amount of uninsured residents in 2015 compared with 2013. Still, the 2015 rate among Hispanics is significantly lower than in 2013, when more than 40 percent of Hispanics were uninsured. It offers private health insurance via online marketplaces called exchanges, often with a very substantial federal subsidy to pay the premiums.
States have the option of establishing health insurance marketplaces of their own, such as Covered California and Kentucky’s Kynect; to partner with federal authorities, as Delaware, Illinois and others did; or to leave the task entirely to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which the majority of states did.
Primarily, the government relied on answers from 26,121 respondents as opposed to an actual count, such as the number of people enrolled in health coverage, data that can be provided by health insurance companies. The uninsured rate declined 7.1 points in the 22 states that implemented both of these measures by December. 31, 2014, compared with a 5.3-point drop across the 28 states that had implemented only one or neither of these actions. In non-expansion states, there was a smaller drop, from 22.7 percent to 16.8 percent.
Arkansas has the highest reduction in rates of uninsured since 2013, according to the survey.
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Among children, the percentage with private coverage increased from 52.6 percent in 2013 to 56.3 percent in the first 3 months of 2015. Still, the difference in the rate of decline in uninsured rates between the two groups of states has now leveled off, and is unchanged relative to the same 1.8-point gap in the rate of decline measured in midyear 2014.
