The percentage of U.S. adults without health insurance reached its highest level in four years, a development that will likely give ammunition to Democrats who say the Trump administration has been working to “sabotage” the U.S. healthcare system.
A new Gallup poll said 13.7 percent of adults had no insurance at the end of 2018, surpassing the 13.4 percent rate seen in 2014.
The uninsured rate fell to a record low of 10.9 percent in 2016, which was former President Barack Obama’s last year in office.
Gallup estimated that roughly 7 million more adults become uninsured between 2016 and 2018, meaning that rates began climbing near the end of Obama’s term and continued to climb during President Trump’s first two years in office.
It’s not clear from the Gallup poll whether those who are now uninsured used to have an Obamacare plan or had one through an employer or government program. Other data, from the Department of Health and Human Services, show that the number of people in Obamacare plans has dropped only slightly since Obama left office.
The highest increases in the uninsured rate were among women, people living in households with annual incomes of less than $48,000 a year, and adults under the age of 35. The young adults had an uninsured rate of more than 21 percent, a 4.8 percentage point increase from two years earlier. Among women, the uninsured rate increased from 8.9 percent in 2016 to 12.8 percent by the end of 2018.
The rate of uninsured plunged beginning in 2014, the year that Obamacare’s programs took effect by giving people government-funded Medicaid coverage or government-subsidized private insurance. It reached a record low by 2016, but then started to climb again. In 2016, several health insurance companies left the Obamacare exchanges and premium prices began to climb by double digits.
The Trump administration took several actions that may have affected the uninsured rate. It spent less on marketing and advertising the law, and the Republican-controlled Congress zeroed out the penalty on the uninsured beginning in 2019. Some customers may have decided to forgo coverage in 2018 as a result of those changes.
Gallup collected the results as part of its Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index. It asked people to answer the question, “Do you have health insurance coverage?” Sample sizes of randomly selected adults in 2018 were around 28,000 per quarter.
