Number of Minnesotans without health insurance grows by 18,000
Some 243,000 Minnesotans lacked health insurance last year, an increase of 18,000 people from 2016, the bureau said in a report released Wednesday morning.
Still, at just 4.5 percent,
Wednesday's release took on special significance because of recent efforts by the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans to scale back the 2010 federal health insurance law, often called Obamacare. The share of uninsured people in
This is the second study to show that health coverage is dropping in
A survey by the
"What is of particular concern is that the uninsurance rate increased at a time of reasonable economic prosperity," said
"I think it is significant and is something we have to watch," said
One long-standing reason why so many Minnesotans have health insurance is that the state's employers are above average in providing the benefit to workers. But employer coverage has shrunk gradually over the last decade as health care costs rose relentlessly.
"If this continues to soften, it creates real worry because we don't have a safety net for people [who have] a job and good income to get affordable insurance coverage," Gildemeister said.
Another factor behind the upturn could be instability in
During that time, premiums spiked for 2017, driving many people away.
"The expense of medical care and the expense of insurance premiums mean that people are making decisions all the time about whether they will be covered this month or this year," said
Obamacare mandate
Schowalter said people still have opportunities to enroll in the state's Medical Assistance and MinnesotaCare programs for low-income residents, as well as use premium subsidies on the MNsure insurance exchange.
"State data shows that half of Minnesotans without insurance probably could get help, whether federal help in paying premiums or state public programs. So we can do better," Schowalter said.
In a major step last year,
The loss of a mandate could drive out "those people who have incomes that are just high enough to not [qualify] for public premium subsidies but still have difficulty affording coverage in the market," said Blewett.
Insurers say it's important to keep both these groups as customers; they broaden the risk pool and help stabilize insurance markets because they tend to have lower medical expenses than other, sicker Americans.
Continued softening in the number of Americans with health insurance could have secondary effects, researchers say. Studies show that the uninsured are more likely to defer care.
And when they do need expensive treatment, it can increase the costs to hospitals in the form of charity care or unpaid hospital bills.
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