Massachusetts had lowest uninsured rate in U.S. in 2019, but rate of uninsured residents increased before COVID-19 pandemic hit, census report shows

MassLive.com

More U.S. residents lacked health care insurance in 2019, and even Massachusetts, the state with the lowest uninsured rate, saw a larger share of residents without health insurance coverage the year before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 2019, 29.6 million people were not covered by health insurance at some point, a million more than a year earlier, according to the bureau’s report on health care coverage. The data captures uninsured rates across the nation in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic that sparked a recession and left millions jobless.

At the state level, the rate of people without health insurance at the time of interview in each state ranged 18.4% in Texas, the highest, to 3% in Massachusetts, the lowest in the nation.

Even Massachusetts saw an increase in its rate of uninsured compared to 2018, when the state’s uninsured rate was 2.8%. Still, the rate of uninsured remained a percentage point lower than it was a decade ago, before the commonwealth’s Medicaid eligibility expansion in 2014.

The change in Massachusetts is small, albeit statistically significant. Twenty other states saw notable increases in their uninsured rate between 2018 and 2019, according to the census data.

The only state with a notable increase in its rate of insured was Virginia, which census officials attributed to the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare.

The uninsured rate, which dropped during the Obama administration with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, appeared to creep up again nationwide after President Donald Trump took office in 2017.

Of the 92% of insured residents, the majority had private insurance plans in 2019, often through their employers. About 220.8 million people, or 68% of the insured, had private health insurance and the other 110.7 million or 34.1% of the insured had a public plan such as Medicare or Medicaid, which offers health care coverage for low-income people.

Nationwide, the number of people buying Obamacare plans or other direct plans fell by 0.3 percentage points. Medicaid enrollment fell by a 0.7 percentage point, while Medicare enrollment grew slightly.

The report’s estimates were based on data from the Current Population Survey, which estimates calendar-year coverage, and the American Community Survey, which looks at changes in coverage when respondents are interviewed and takes a closer look at key populations.

The U.S. economy saw some signs of progress in 2019: the median household income increased 6.8% to $68,700 in 2019, the highest in five decades. The national poverty rate fell 1.3 percentage points to 10.5%, according to the census data.

But income inequality persisted. The richest 20% of residents received 51.9% of all income. When residents are broken down in five groups based on household income, the richest 20% reported more income than the four other, less affluent quintiles combined.