Trends to Watch for in the Census Bureau’s Release of New Health Insurance Data

Home 9 Health Care 9 Trends to Watch for in the Census Bureau’s Release of New Health Insurance Data

As a lover of data, I have been looking forward to this week because the Census Bureau is making two major releases of 2012 survey data:

  • On Tuesday, September 17, data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) will be released.
  • On Thursday, September 19, the Census Bureau will release more detailed data from the American Community Survey (ACS) related to income, poverty, educational attainment and insurance coverage.

Both surveys will be interesting for what they tell us about national trends in poverty, income and health insurance. I’m particularly interested in seeing what we can learn about the need for the reforms in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and whether Medicaid and CHIP have continued to reduce the percentage of children who are uninsured.

For most purposes the ACS is the much more useful data source because it is based on a survey that is 30 times larger than the CPS. However, the CPS, which is the older of the two, is good for looking at longer-term trends, especially at the national level and particularly for health insurance trends (because the ACS only recently began including that question). The far larger size of the ACS allows much better comparisons between states, and it also provides data for about 23 Wisconsin counties.Although we don’t know exactly what to expect from either survey, a blog post by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that clues in other data sources suggest some health insurance trends to watch for:

  • There was probably a continued decline in the number of uninsured young adults, thanks to the provision in the ACA allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ employer-sponsored coverage until age 26.
  • The percentage of adults aged 26 to 64 who have employer-sponsored insurance has probably continued to decline, though the drop in employer coverage may be masked at first glance by the increased coverage among younger adults.
  • The percentage of children with public coverage probably increased again in 2012, and the percentage uninsured may have declined again, thanks to the ongoing success of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in picking up the slack as employer coverage has declined. (CHIP is coming up for renewal in Congress.)

Stay tuned on Tuesday and Thursday for our analysis of the Census Bureau data.

Jon Peacock

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