Modest Improvements in Poverty and Insurance Coverage, but Many Wisconsinites Are Still Feeling Effects of the Recession

The Wisconsin economy has been slowly recovering from the Great Recession for a couple of years now, and small signs of that recovery can be seen in the newly released census data for 2011.  But the new figures from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) reveal that the gradual economic gains have yet to benefit many of Wisconsin’s most vulnerable households:

• Wisconsin’s child poverty rate was 18.2% in 2011, which represents an improvement from 19.1% in 2010, yet it remains far above the 13.4% rate in 2008.
• Median household income was $50,395 last year, a small and statistically insignificant drop from 2010, yet almost 8% below the $54,737 figure in 2007.
• The Black child poverty rate (49% in 2011) was nearly four times the rate for White children in Wisconsin, and median household income for Blacks in the state was just $24,399 in 2011, which is less than half the $52,444 earned by White households.

The new ACS figures are based on a sample that is 30 times the size of the Current Population Survey, which released data last week.  Because it is so much larger, the ACS also provides data for Wisconsin’s 23 largest counties, and you can find some of the data for all 23 counties in two tables in today’s WCCF press release.

Last week’s sketchy CPS poverty and health insurance numbers for Wisconsin gave me a scare, but we downplayed that worrisome data because CPS figures are so imprecise.  Fortunately, the new and far more detailed ACS numbers paint a much more positive picture, particularly with respect to health insurance:

• Approximately 20,000 fewer Wisconsinites were uninsured last year, as the percentage of state residents lacking insurance fell from 9.4% in 2010 to 9.0% in 2011.
• Wisconsin continues to have the 7th lowest rate, well below the national average of 15.1%.
• The portion of Wisconsin children who were uninsured fell to just 4.4%, from 5.0% in 2010.
• The share of Wisconsin’s young adults aged 19-25 who have private insurance grew by 2.5 percentage points from 2009 to 2011, thanks in large part to the Affordable Care Act provision allowing young adults to get coverage through their parents’ plans.

Although those trends reflect a little progress, the fact that more than 46 million Americans and over half a million Wisconsinites were uninsured last year indicates that there is a lot of work to be done. Those figures underscore the importance of the Medicaid option and new health insurance exchanges provided by the ACA, starting in 2014.

It’s important to note that the health insurance reforms in Massachusetts, which served as the model for the ACA, have reduced the uninsured rate to just 4.3%, compared to 9.0% in Wisconsin and 15.1% nationally.

Read more in today’s WCCF press release.

Jon Peacock