CDC: Fewer poor Americans lacked health insurance in 2014

Low-income communities, minorities and young adults saw the biggest gains in coverage as millions of Americans gained health insurance through the Affordable Care Act in 2014, according to the first full year of government data on health insurance coverage since the launch of state- and federally-run insurance exchanges under the ACA, often called “Obamacare.”

About 36 million Americans, or 11.5 percent of the population, said they were uninsured in 2014 — down from 14.4 percent in 2013 — according to a nationwide survey conducted by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics (PDF). 

The number of people who reported that they had been uninsured for more than a year dropped in 2014 to 8.4 percent, or 23.6 million people, down from 10.7 percent the previous year, the CDC said.

Young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 saw the most significant gains in insurance coverage in 2014, with 20 percent lacking health insurance in 2014, down from 26.5 percent the previous year.

The number of uninsured African-Americans and Hispanics declined substantially. Just 13.5 percent of African-Americans under the age of 65 were uninsured in 2014, down from 18.9 percent the year before. Among Latinos, uninsured people under 65 dropped to 25.2 percent from 30.3 percent. Among whites, it fell to 9.8 percent in 2014 from 12.1 percent in 2013.

Lower-income Americans also saw substantial gains in coverage. Uninsured people living below the federal poverty line — earning less than about $12,000 a year for a single person or around $24,000 a year for a family of four — dropped to 22.3 percent in 2014 from 27.3 percent in 2013. For people the survey considered “near-poor,” meaning that they live below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, those without insurance fell to 23.5 percent in 2014 from 29.3 percent in 2013.

“The law has had a more pronounced effect in covering African-Americans than whites,” Larry Levitt, a director at the Program for the Study of Health Reform and Private Insurance at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told The New York Times. He said that the ACA was specifically designed to help lower-income Americans get insurance coverage, and that African-Americans are more likely to have lower incomes. “If all states were expanding Medicaid, you’d see an even bigger effect," Levitt added.

The expansion of Medicaid insurance to cover a greater proportion of low-income adults has been the subject of a contentious debate in several U.S. states. But the CDC survey indicates that the Obama administration’s goal to get more of these adults covered is working. While many states have opted to accept the expansion of Medicaid to include adults living at or below 138 percent of the poverty line, some states — often governed by Republican leadership — have refused, arguing that the Medicaid system is broken and that private health care options would work better.

The ACA appeared to affect the uninsured population differently depending on where they live. In Hawaii, only 2.5 percent of the population was uninsured in 2014, but that figure stood at 21.5 percent in both Oklahoma and Texas, the survey found.

Among people under age 65, the states that had the biggest drops in uninsured people in 2014 were West Virginia, with a 14.8 percentage point decrease; Arkansas, down 8.5 percentage points; Washington, with a 7.4-point drop; and Nevada, with a decrease of 7.2 points.

Among the 170.4 million people who had private health insurance coverage in 2014, 2.2 percent of them had plans bought through the ACA’s state-run insurance exchanges or the federal health insurance marketplace, both of which were launched in 2013.