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Health Insurance Coverage Type

Measure Overview

Knowing who has health insurance coverage and what type of coverage they have, and, importantly, who doesn’t have coverage, is a foundational building block in understanding health needs of a population (ability to access and utilize care and services), understanding affordability (costs of care both in dollars and in behavior changes), and is an important consideration when assessing quality of care and health outcomes.

State Health Compare provides annually updated state-level measures of health insurance coverage using single-year data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) by multiple types of coverage including Medicare, employer-sponsored insurance (ESI), Medicaid, and individual coverage, as well as no insurance coverage, and across a number of breakdowns, including: age, citizenship, disability status, education, family income, health status, limited English proficiency, marital status, poverty level, race/ethnicity, sex, and work status.*

*As SHADAC and other organizations have documented, the COVID-19 pandemic was the cause of several substantial disruptions to data collection and dissemination efforts for the 2020 ACS, impacting 2020 single-year estimates of health insurance coverage. Though the 2016-2020 5-year data were able to be released as usual, SHADAC will continue to monitor any future changes to federal data releases directly or indirectly related to the pandemic. Estimates of coverage for 2020 from the Current Population Survey are available here.

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Notes

Respondents are asked about their health insurance coverage at the time of the interview and may select multiple types of coverage. SHADAC's primary source of coverage hierarchy is applied to assign one coverage type to each respondent. If multiple sources of coverage were reported for an observation, primary source of coverage was assigned in the following order: 1) Medicare (for people age 19 or older); 2) employer-sponsored insurance (ESI), TRICARE or other military health care, or VA; 3) Medicaid; 4) Individual coverage; and 5) Medicare (for people age 18 or under). Private coverage includes employer (plus TRICARE and VA) and individual coverage. Public coverage includes Medicaid (plus CHIP and state-specific public programs) and Medicare. The margin of error (MOE) represents the uncertainty of an estimate due to sampling variability; the calculated MOE is 95%. N/A indicates that data were not available or suppressed because the number of sample cases was too small. Data for 2020 were not officially released by the U.S. Census Bureau due to pandemic-related disruptions to data collection and resulting problems with data quality.

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