Two new analyses released this week provide further evidence of the sharp disparities between African Americans and whites in Wisconsin. The latest evidence comes from a study of trends in life expectancy rates from the journal Health Affairs and new health insurance data from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS).

The study published in Health Affairs finds that while many states are making significant progress towards decreasing the life expectancy gap between African Americans and whites, Wisconsin is not one of them. In fact, Wisconsin was the only state that showed a significant increase in this gap. Here are some highlights from the report, “Trends in the Black-White Life Expectancy Gap among US States, 1990–2009”:

• Over the 20-year span examined in the study, the nation-wide life expectancy gap between African Americans and Whites shrank by 2.7 years for males and 1.7 years for females.
• However in Wisconsin, the gap for African American women, compared to White women, increased drastically from 4.9 to 6.4 years.
• While White women in Wisconsin experienced a 2-year increase in their like expectancy, the life expectancy for African American women in our state only improved by 0.4 years.
• For African American men in Wisconsin the gap in life expectancy is even larger than for women, although the increase was smaller – from 7.7 years to 7.9 years.

One of the factors contributing to disparities in health outcomes, though by no means the largest factor, is access to health insurance. DHS’s 2012 Family Health Survey Health Survey shows that insurance coverage in Wisconsin is no stranger to racial disparities. The survey looks at state-wide health insurance coverage as well as health insurance usage across a variety of demographic areas. The new DHS survey data for 2012 show that 16.5% of African American Wisconsinites reported being uninsured for all or part of the previous year, compared to just 9.5% of whites.

The substantial disparities in access to insurance are one more reason why it’s important for our state to take full advantage of the options provided by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to help Wisconsinites obtain quality, affordable health care coverage. Preliminary data indicate that the ACA has been very effective in reducing un-insurance rates for minorities and lower income families. The Urban Institute reported that non-white, non-Hispanic Americans comprised 22.4% of the uninsured non-elderly adults in the third quarter of 2013 — prior to the implementation this year of significant improvements in access to insurance. In June of this year (six months into implementation of important ACA measures), that minority population was just 18.6% of the uninsured adults.

Reducing the wide life expectancy gap between whites and African Americans in Wisconsin will require much more than improving access to insurance; we also need to tackle a wide range of other factors which are often described as social determinants of health (these include income, education, community safety, family support, housing, and transit). Nevertheless, reducing the racial divide in access to health insurance would be an important step in making progress toward reducing the very large gap in life expectancy in Wisconsin.

Jelicia Diggs and Jon Peacock