Tuesday, February 15, 2022

The Five Worst States

State of residence increasingly determines physical and economic wellbeing. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the latest statistics on health insurance coverage. Among the population under age 65, those living in states that refused to expand Medicaid coverage as intended by the Affordable Care Act are much more likely to be without health insurance, according to a National Center for Health Statistics report. 

As of 2020, 35 states had expanded Medicaid coverage to include all adults with incomes up to and including 138 percent of the federal poverty level. In the Medicaid expansion states, only 8.5 percent of people under age 65 were uninsured. 

Fifteen states had not expanded Medicaid coverage as of 2020. In those states, fully 17.1 percent of the population under age 65 was uninsured—double the uninsured rate of the expansion states. These were the holdout states at the time: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Three of these states have expanded Medicaid since 2020—Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.

Which states are the worst when it comes to health insurance? These are the top five...

Five states with the largest percentage of uninsured among population under age 65, 2020
24.0% in Oklahoma
23.1% in Texas
20.3% in Georgia
16.9% in North Carolina
16.7% in Florida

Source: National Center for Health Statistics, Geographic Variation in Health Insurance Coverage: United States, 2020 (PDF)

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