New Census Data Confirm that Wisconsin Continues to Be a Leader in Providing Access to Health Insurance

by Kids Forward | September 18, 2010

Home 9 Health Care 9 New Census Data Confirm that Wisconsin Continues to Be a Leader in Providing Access to Health Insurance

Poverty and income figures for 2009 that were released yesterday by the U.S. Census Bureau provide additional evidence of the economic pain that the Great Recession has inflicted on families across the nation. In some respects, such as median household income, that toll has been even heavier in Wisconsin, yet Wisconsin continues to be a leader in providing access to health insurance. 

Although much of the Current Population Survey (CPS) data in the new Census Bureau report  is very worrisome, there were a couple of positive parts of the latest health insurance numbers. At the national level, the bad news with respect to health care is that the number and share of Americans without health insurance rose by 4.3 million and 1.3 percentage points, respectively, from 2008 to 2009. These increases were propelled by a 2.9 percentage point decrease in people with employer-sponsored insurance. The silver lining to the dark news on health insurance is that there was a 1.7 percentage point increase in Medicaid coverage last year, which picked up more than half the slack created by the drop in employer insurance.
  
Another bit of good news is that even though the share of working-age adults lacking coverage went up, the share of children lacking coverage didn’t. That can be attributed to improvements to the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in 2009, to state efforts to take advantage of the new CHIP funding and policy options, and to the enhanced federal funding for Medicaid, which was part of the fiscal relief provided to states in the Recovery Act. The different outcomes for children and adults illustrate the importance of health reform, which will give adults much of the improved access to affordable coverage through both private and public health care programs that children already enjoy.
  
When the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey data is released, it’s always difficult to decide what to make of the state-level health insurance data. Because that survey uses a relative small sample size (100,000 people nationally), and the figures for any particular state in any specific year have a large margin of error, the Census Bureau urges analysts to average together at least two years of data. That improves the statistical reliability of the data, but tends to mask recent trends. The data from the American Community Survey (ACS), which will be released on September 28, is based on a sample size 30 times larger than the CPS, making the ACS numbers far more accurate. Unfortunately, the ACS only began asking the health insurance question in 2008, which makes the CPS the only option for comparing states on a long-term basis.

With those qualifications in mind, here’s what the CPS health data reveal for Wisconsin:

  • An estimated 531,000 Wisconsinites lacked health insurance in 2008-09.
  • That’s way too many people, yet Wisconsin’s 9.6 percent uninsurance rate tied our state with Vermont for the fourth lowest rate of unemployed state residents.
  • The 2008-09 average of uninsured people was up by about 61,000 in Wisconsin, but that increase isn’t statistically significant, and it takes us back to the uninsured level in 2004-05.
  • BadgerCare Plus has filled the gap for many families and individuals who lost their job-based coverage due to the recession. According to the CPS data, approximately 160,000 Wisconsinites under the age of 65 lost their employer-sponsored coverage form 2006-07 to 2008-09, but 141,000 gained Medicaid or BadgerCare Plus coverage.

In other words, the CPS results indicate that the loss of jobs private insurance during the Great Recession has kept BadgerCare Plus from yielding a significant drop in the number of uninsured state residents. On the other hand, BadgerCare Plus has kept the recession from significantly increasing the number of uninsured Wisconsinites, and our state continues to have one of the lowest uninsurance rates – even though the Wisconsin economy has been battered particularly hard by the recession.

“The loss of employer-sponsored coverage underscores the importance of maintaining support for BadgerCare Plus, a program that has helped make Wisconsin a national leader in covering kids and families,” said WCCF’s executive director, Ken Taylor. “It also points to the importance of federal health care reform, which could lead to coverage for tens of millions of Americans who are currently uninsured.”

We’ll take a much closer look at the health insurance and poverty data for our state on September 26, when the Census Bureau releases the much more detailed and more reliable ACS results.

Jon Peacock
WCCF Research Director

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