Wisconsin Numbers Are Worrisome, but We’ll Reserve Judgment until More Precise Figures Are Unveiled Next Week

Figures released Wednesday by the U.S Census Bureau show that the number of uninsured Americans fell by more than 1.3 million in 2011. That’s just the second decrease in the last decade and the largest decline during that period.

The new national data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) highlight some successes and challenges for the federal health care reform law.   One of the successes is that insurance coverage among young adults aged 19-25 grew by about 540,000 in 2011, thanks in large part to the Affordable Care Act provision allowing young adults to get coverage through their parents’ plans. In addition, the maintenance of effort provisions in the ACA have protected Medicaid, and that coverage has continued to mitigate the effects of declining employer-sponsored insurance.

On the other hand, the fact that more than 48 million Americans and well 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 portions of the ACA that take effect in 2014 – particularly the new health insurance exchanges and the Medicaid option that can be used to fill a large gap in BadgerCare.Because the CPS does not include a large survey sample in each state, the state-level figures provide a less precise picture of recent Wisconsin trends than we would like. It’s necessary to average together two years of data, and even then the margins of error are relatively high. We will get a much more accurate picture of state and local changes next week when the Census Bureau releases the results of the 2011 American Community Survey, which uses a survey sample 30 times larger than the CPS.

We anxiously await that data because the state-level CPS results suggest a pretty large jump in the number of Wisconsinites uninsured in 2010-11. The apparent increase from 9.1% uninsured all year  in 2008-09 to 9.9% in 2010-11 is worrisome, but isn’t large enough to be statistically significant (because of the low sample size). On the plus side, despite the rise in that percentage for 2010-11, Wisconsin’s two-year average was still the 7th lowest nationally — which is a testament to the success of BadgerCare. 

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at some of the other CPS findings. In the meantime, you can read more in today’s WCCF press release.

Jon Peacock