But in 2014, after the Affordable Care Act began requiring almost every American to have insurance, the number of those without coverage in the state dropped to about 12.4 percent – or roughly 4.7 million people, the data show.
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New Mexico is also aided by the fact that the state accepted Medicaid expansion; this is something other states with Republican governors have not done and their uninsured rates have not dropped at the levels of the states with the expansion.
In Wisconsin, the uninsured rate decreased from 9.1% to 7.3%, a drop from 518,000 uninsured people to 418,000.
The bureau’s annual survey of health insurance coverage, released last week, showed Oklahoma’s uninsured rate at 15.4 percent in 2014.
New census data suggest that the Affordable Care Act – not the recovering economy – deserves the lion’s share of credit for cutting the rate of people who were uninsured past year in Ohio and across the country.
The rate of uninsured declined despite the fact that there was no change in median household income or the official poverty rate, the Census Bureau said.
New figures from the U.S. Census Bureau show more Connecticut residents have health insurance, but there may be trouble ahead for some Medicaid recipients. Meanwhile, median household income in the United States was $53,660 in 2014.
But the Census sampling, known as the American Community Survey, lends new credibility to earlier claims that Texas continues to lead the nation in the raw number – and rate – of people without health insurance.
Not everyone was in agreement about the report’s results, with the Heritage Foundation, a right-leaning think tank here, pointing out discrepancies between the Census Bureau data and other government reports. In 2013, 11.3 percent of county residents were uninsured. While 10 percent of non-Hispanic whites were poor previous year, the poverty rate for blacks and Hispanics was about 2 1/2 times higher.
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The number of Kentuckians without health insurance fell by 250,000 in 2014, the report says. Expanding Medicaid and making private insurance easier to purchase by those without employer coverage were key focuses of the health law.
