Annual Census Report on Health Insurance Coverage: What Will this Report Look Like After 2014?

By Clive Riddle, September 19, 2013

The U.S. Census Bureau has just released their annual report: Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012. This year’s 88-page report was “compiled from information collected in the 2013 Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC). The CPS-ASEC was conducted between February-April 2013 and collected information about income and health insurance coverage during the 2012 calendar year.”

The key takeaway? “The percentage of people without health insurance coverage declined to 15.4 percent in 2012 ─ from 15.7 percent in 2011. However, the 48.0 million people without coverage in 2012 was not statistically different from the 48.6 million in 2011.”

Here’s some summary figures compiled from the report:

	2011%	2012%	2011#(mil)	2012#(mil)
Uninsured	15.7%	15.4%	48.0	48.0
Private Coverage	63.9%	63.9%	197.3	198.8
Public Coverage	32.2%	32.6%	99.5	101.5

Here’s the respective demographic from each category with the greatest improvement in percentage change in uninsured from 2012 over 2011, compiled from the report:

• Family Status: unrelated subfamilies -5.3%
• Race: Asia -1.7%
• Age: under age 25 -0.5%
• Nativity: foreign born naturalized citizen -0.9%
• Region: Midwest -0.8%
• Work Experience: Did not work at least one week -0.9%

Finally, here’s a breakdown of the percentage of the total population covered by more specific coverage categories for 2011 and 2012; the totals add up to more than 100% due to dual coverage:

	2011%	2012%
Employment based	55.1%	54.9%
Direct-purchase	9.8%	9.8%
Medicare	15.2%	15.7%
Medicaid	11.5%	11.3%
Military	4.4%	4.4%
Uninsured	15.7%	15.4%

The big question is, what will this report look like two years from now, when the 2014 data is compiled?