The portion of people in the United States with health insurance rose slightly in 2016, according to a census report released Tuesday, though analysts said they were unable to determine how much of that increase was attributable to Obamacare, and how much was due to an improved economy.
According to the census data, 91.2 percent of people had health insurance in the U.S. in 2016, up 0.3 percentage points from 2015.
Analysts noted that the rise in insurance coverage started in 2014, after many of the coverage expansions under Obamacare were implemented. The law calls for the expansion of Medicaid to low-income people, which the Supreme Court made optional for states, and sets up exchanges that allow for the sale of tax subsidized private health insurance on the exchanges.
Analysts said the immediate gains following 2013 were attributable to Obamacare, but they were unable to tease out whether the law or the improved economy led to the slight rise in the insurance rate in 2016.
Jennifer Cheeseman Day, assistant division chief for employment characteristics in the Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division at the U.S. Census Bureau, said it wasn’t clear, for example, how much of the increase was due to people getting health insurance through a job.
Recent gains in coverage varied widely across geography and race. Whites have the lowest uninsured rate at just 6.3 percent, and Hispanics have the highest uninsured rate, at 16 percent, even though they had overall declines in poverty in recent years. The uninsured rates for blacks and Asians were 10.5 percent and 7.6 percent, respectively.
Massachusetts, which had a state health insurance system that Obamacare was modeled after, had the lowest uninsurance rate, at 2.5 percent, while Texas had the highest, at 16.6 percent. The American Community Survey also showed that between 2015 and 2016, the uninsured rate decreased in 39 states. The declines for the states ranged from 0.3 percentage points in Massachusetts to 3.5 percentage points in Montana.
Eleven states and the District of Columbia did not have a statistically significant change in their uninsured rate.
The largest increase in coverage occurred in the Medicare population, the report noted. According to the data, it was the only subtype of health insurance that experienced a “statistically significant” change between 2015 and 2016, rising by 0.4 percentage points to 16.7 percent in 2016.
“This increase was likely due to growth in the number of people age 65 and over and not to changes in Medicare coverage rates within any particular age group,” the authors conclude.
